Kari & Kyle Hanks share their journey of leaving the secretive 2×2 church, a religious group with no official name, written doctrine, or corporate structure. They discuss their upbringings, struggles with faith, the exclusivity of the religion, and the trauma they endured. From discovering the church’s hidden history to creating a support group for ex-members, they expose abuse scandals, strict doctrines on women, and emotional suppression within the group. Their deconstruction was influenced by the Mormon Stories Podcast, COVID-19, and personal revelations about belief, identity, and autonomy. Now, they advocate for informed consent and support those leaving high-control religions.
Episode Transcript
Host: John Dehlin · Co-host: Margi Dehlin · Guests: Kari Hanks, Kyle Hanks
This transcript is machine-generated and lightly edited for readability. The audio is authoritative. Please excuse occasional errors in names and spelling.
Introduction to the Two by Twos
John Dehlin [00:00:00] Up until a couple years ago, I had never heard of the two by twos. I mean, what I would have heard is like secretive Christian cult, child abuse scandal. Missionaries go around in twos.
Kyle Hanks [00:00:10] They don't have a written doctrine, no written creeds or anything. They successfully never had a name. We have no church building, we have no church organization at all, which is why you've never heard of us.
John Dehlin [00:00:20] That sounds so appealing because what's wrong with churches these days? It's the corporations, it's the greed, it's the power, it's the bureaucracy. But if you want to fly under the radar, if you want to have no accountability, if you want to avoid scrutiny, there's a brilliance in not having a corporate head, right?
Kyle Hanks [00:00:41] You'll never blame the system if you can not have a system.
Kari Hanks [00:00:44] We were surrounded by violence in general as two by twos. We had a lot of corporal punishment. So it was very normalized. And I never really saw that as being abnormal or unusual. Growing up as a two by two girl, you're taught to be mature from a very young age. Like your goal in life is to get married and have a family. I often got the comment, you should smile more or also you're smiling too much. You just have to have the exact right which ends up just being kind of a flat line, no emotion. You do not cut your hair, no makeup, no jewelry, no piercings of any kind, no dyeing your hair, no tv.
Kyle Hanks [00:01:27] There's a lot of disjointed rules that didn't make any sense that you held to religiously because you just want it to be as safe as possible, right?
Margi Dehlin [00:01:34] Obedience is the point.
Kari Hanks [00:01:35] When you leave the two by twos, you're completely afloat. There was no support group, there was no community.
Kyle Hanks [00:01:42] It's so underground that people, when they leave, will spend years not talking to anybody about it because they don't know how to find people. And to foreshadow a little bit, the Mormon Stories podcast was motivational for us in setting up a support group and developing an excommunity.
John Dehlin [00:01:59] What happens when one day you wake up, you're married with children, and you realize you might be in a cult or a high demand religion? I'm John Dehlin, host of Mormon Stories Podcast, and today we are going to be talking about an organization called the Two by Twos. Some call them a cult, some call them a high demand religion, some call them just a Christian church. But we're gonna be talking about that organization and it's also super fun. This is a continuing episode in our series on never, Mormons who listen to and find value in Mormon stories because it helps them understand their own worldview better. And it's March 12, 2025. And joining us today in studio are Kari. Hey, Kari.
Kari Hanks [00:02:47] Hi, Kari.
John Dehlin [00:02:48] And Kyle.
Kari Hanks [00:02:49] Hello.
John Dehlin [00:02:49] Thanks. Hey, welcome to Salt Lake City.
Kyle Hanks [00:02:52] Thanks for having us.
Kari Hanks [00:02:53] Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.
Meet Kari and Kyle: Raised in the Two by Twos
John Dehlin [00:02:54] Yeah. So y' all were raised as members of the Two by Twos, is that right?
Kyle Hanks [00:03:02] Yep. Yeah, it's. It's the Two by Twos now. We use that term now, but nobody in the group calls it that. In fact, it doesn't have a name at all. So we've been pushing the term two by two because it's the most unique term you could associate with this group. They like to call themselves a lot of other things, like the Truth or the Way or God's Children, Saints and servants, Friends and workers. Friends and workers.
John Dehlin [00:03:27] And for those of you who want to kind of google them or check them out, there are several ABC News reports because like many high demand religions and or cults, they have been enveloped over the past few years in a child sexual abuse cover up scandal like so many of these organizations are. And as I understand it, when y' all started waking up from your experiences and starting to look at the church more critically, you even started a support group on Reddit for X2X2's Facebook. Oh, it's a Facebook group.
Kari Hanks [00:04:07] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:04:07] Oh, okay. I went to Reddit. I should have gone to Facebook. So y' all are kind of the leaders of. Is that fair to say? You're kind of leaders in an X2X2 movement? Is that fair to say?
Kari Hanks [00:04:19] I would avoid the term leader, but we started a support group. Yes.
John Dehlin [00:04:24] Founders, not leaders.
Margi Dehlin [00:04:25] Facilitators.
Kari Hanks [00:04:26] Facilitators, yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:04:28] Facilitators. Administrators of a group.
Kari Hanks [00:04:30] Yes.
John Dehlin [00:04:31] All right, well, I'm deeply curious. I'm of course joined by my wife, Margi. Hey, Margi.
Margi Dehlin [00:04:37] Hello.
John Dehlin [00:04:38] And yeah, so this is going to be an interview in two parts. We're going to learn about the history of the organization commonly referred to as the Two by Twos kind of history. This is going to be very much in the spirit of the Scientology series we did years ago, the Jehovah's Witnesses series we did years ago, where we sort of learn about a cult or high demand religion that we really don't know a lot about. Then we hear about your upbringing in that church up until the point where you start to realize that it may not be what you thought that's going to be.
John Dehlin [00:05:15] As we're Planning it. Part one of this series, we'll leave on that cliffhanger. And then we're going to have a part two where we talk about how you started unraveling and deconstructing your two by two faith, we'll call it. And then what reconstruction has been like for y' all as EX2 by 2ers, for lack of a better term, and being community organizers and builders for others affected as well. How's that sound?
Kyle Hanks [00:05:46] Sounds good.
Kari Hanks [00:05:47] Yeah, Sounds great.
Margi Dehlin [00:05:48] Yep.
John Dehlin [00:05:48] Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [00:05:49] Okay.
John Dehlin [00:05:49] Do you want to start just by introducing yourselves?
Margi Dehlin [00:05:52] Sure.
Kyle Hanks [00:05:53] Well, I'm Kyle. I'm Kyle Hanks. Kyle Hanks. Yeah. What do you want to know about me?
John Dehlin [00:05:59] What do you want to share?
Kyle Hanks [00:06:02] Yeah. Well, I'll just broadly say that I was a member of this group until my mid-30s.
John Dehlin [00:06:06] So born and raised.
Kyle Hanks [00:06:09] Born and raised. Okay. And I think that's all for now. I'll cover it all as we go.
Margi Dehlin [00:06:12] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:06:13] In the Seattle area.
Kyle Hanks [00:06:14] Seattle area, mostly. And then the last few years, we've lived in. Well, how long have we lived in Phoenix now? 15 years. No, 2012.
Kari Hanks [00:06:21] Almost 14.
Kyle Hanks [00:06:22] Almost 14 years.
John Dehlin [00:06:23] All right. And Kari.
Kari Hanks [00:06:25] I'm Kari Hanks. I also am a born and raised two by two. Goes back in my family 115 years.
Margi Dehlin [00:06:33] Whoa.
Kari Hanks [00:06:34] Yeah. So fourth generation on one side and third generation on the other. And. Yeah. Left when I was 33. With our kids. Three kids.
Margi Dehlin [00:06:44] So.
John Dehlin [00:06:45] And y' all have been listening to Mormon stories Five years. For five years.
Kyle Hanks [00:06:49] At least five.
Kari Hanks [00:06:50] We're trying to figure that out, but at least five years. Yep.
Kyle Hanks [00:06:53] Yeah. I don't remember when we started, but
Kari Hanks [00:06:54] we were still two by twos when we started listening.
John Dehlin [00:06:56] What?
Kyle Hanks [00:06:57] It was a key part of our deconstruction.
Kari Hanks [00:06:58] It was.
Kyle Hanks [00:06:59] We'll get into it. But we were both listening separately and didn't realize the other was listening.
John Dehlin [00:07:03] No.
Kyle Hanks [00:07:05] And neither of us can remember how we came across your podcast.
Margi Dehlin [00:07:07] What?
John Dehlin [00:07:08] And yet you were both simultaneously watching without knowing the other was watching.
Kyle Hanks [00:07:12] Yeah. And if I remember right, I think I mentioned it to Kari and she said, yeah, I think I've donated to them.
Kari Hanks [00:07:20] Yeah. It's a big part of our story during a time that was really difficult.
Kyle Hanks [00:07:25] Yeah. And to foreshadow a little bit, the Mormon Stories podcast was motivational for us in setting up a support group and developing an X community, so. Cause there really wasn't a lot of fun.
Kari Hanks [00:07:35] Yes. Thank you both for doing what you do.
John Dehlin [00:07:37] Oh, well, we're honored. We're honored to have you as a part of this series. Okay. So that's fun. I'm just. I'm dying to hear. So I will say that up until a couple years ago, I had never heard of the Two by Twos. I think I had heard about them before y' all reached out. But just like typical. I mean, what I would have heard is like, secretive Christian cult that has child abuse scandal. You know, missionaries go around in twos, don't know much about them. That's kind of what I would have known prior to y' all reaching out. So now we can dive into the history of the church.
Origins and Structure of the Group
Kyle Hanks [00:08:15] Yeah, unfortunately, because of how they're organized, they don't keep records or anything. So people's first. A lot of people's first impression of them is hearing about a scandal in the news. So. But we'll talk about them. So there's two versions of their history of who this group is. The version inside is that it's always been there. It goes all the way back to Jesus. They have little trite, little sayings. They like to say, like, we go back to the shores of Galilee, meaning Jesus came down to earth, called his 12 disciples, sent them forth, and. And they continued on unchanged or continuous. What do they call it? Continuous apostolic succession. Apostolic succession.
Kari Hanks [00:08:57] Basically they believe that Paul in the Bible was the first, what we would call overseer.
Margi Dehlin [00:09:03] I see.
Kyle Hanks [00:09:04] They do what a lot of churches like to do, which is go back, grab characters from the Bible and post date their titles. So we've done that and called them workers is a term we use for people who.
Kari Hanks [00:09:15] Yeah. So Jesus disciples would have been the first workers.
John Dehlin [00:09:18] Can I just say that something that I did with the Scientology and the Jehovah's Witness episode that I think people appreciated was just whenever I hear something that sounds Mormon, I like to kind of note kind of a parallel or.
Kari Hanks [00:09:31] That would be awesome.
Margi Dehlin [00:09:31] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:09:32] And for sure the Mormon Church believes it's the one true church. And for sure the Mormon Church would claim its authority stems all the way back to Jesus, which is not dissimilar to, let's say the Catholic Church, but this idea of authority and is necessary and it goes all the way back to Jesus. Like I remember being given what's called my line of Authority As a 12 year old boy, when I got the priesthood, it would say John got the priesthood from Dave Delin, Dave Delin got it from Preston Delin. Preston Delin got it from. And then it would go back to Joseph Smith, and then it would go to Peter, James and John or John the Baptist, and then it would go back to Jesus and so that line of succession, one true church thing is absolutely core to Mormonism. So it's already very familiar anyway.
Kari Hanks [00:10:18] Yeah, it's an exclusive Israel. So they believe that you have to hear God's word preached through the workers to have salvation.
Kyle Hanks [00:10:26] Yeah, so we'll use the term workers a lot. It's their preachers, they're preachers that go in pairs. If you read, there's a verse in Matthew 10 where he called the disciples, and if you read the verse in the kjv, which is the only Bible we use, there's semicolons between every pair of names. So you'll see. You know, I can't remember the names in order, but that's how they read that is like, oh, well, Jesus sent the, the, we call them workers now in pairs to go out and preach the gospel completely in faith. We have no church building, we have no church organization at all, which is why you've never heard of us.
Kari Hanks [00:10:59] They're not registered.
Kyle Hanks [00:11:00] Not registered. Unless there's certain cases, fringe cases, where governments have required it. But, but we don't have an organization that we recognize. So.
Kari Hanks [00:11:08] And that's why they're called the two by twos, because their ministers go out to and to in pairs. Sometimes if they have like an odd number of ministers in a certain area, you'll see a field with like three versus two. But for the most part they go out in same gendered pairs, both brother workers and sister workers.
John Dehlin [00:11:26] So I wanna, immediately, I wanna ask about that. Cause there's a brilliance, there's sort of probably huge disadvantages, but also brilliance in not having a corporate head. If on the one hand I think churches are started so they can have a tax shelter, so they can funnel money, so they can have religious protections under the law. So I can see a lot of. And so that they can have name recognition or brand recognition. So in that sense, I can see why churches would want to have corporate heads. But if you want to fly under the radar, if you want to have no accountability, if you want to avoid scrutiny, negative scrutiny, and you're able to grow without the that and make tracking you very difficult.
Kyle Hanks [00:12:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's toward the end of our story. That'll be a big thing. Doctrinally, it's kind of brilliant.
John Dehlin [00:12:19] Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:12:20] But doctrinally it's clever too, because when you're raised in it, as most people who are in it now were raised in it at this point, you've never known anything different. Not having an organization looks like God, it looks like, it's led by the
John Dehlin [00:12:36] spirit, in a sense.
Kari Hanks [00:12:37] Yeah. They would say they're not a religion, they're not a church. Most of the time when I was growing up, we did not identify as Christian.
Kyle Hanks [00:12:45] Yeah, we didn't use that word.
Kari Hanks [00:12:46] We took the name of Jesus, but we are not Christians. That's because Christians call us religion. And we're not a religion. We're a way of life.
John Dehlin [00:12:53] And you know what? I should have started there, because that sounds so appealing, because what's wrong with churches these days? It's the corporations, it's the greed, it's the power, it's the bureaucracy. And so to say, hey, we're just reading the words of Jesus and going out two by two and having our families and following the word of Jesus, that actually sounds super compelling.
Kari Hanks [00:13:15] They make it sound very simple and very appealing. But when you start to delve into the hierarchy and the actual teachings and the rules that they say aren't rules, it gets complicated pretty quickly.
Kyle Hanks [00:13:27] Yeah, it's really handy. Anytime anything bad happens, they'll reframe it in real time. Like, oh, we're just getting together to study the Bible. We just love our little meeting of friends.
John Dehlin [00:13:37] And.
Kyle Hanks [00:13:37] And they'll kind of reframe it as much simpler than it is to say that. That's the good part. That's why we're actually here. All this other stuff. Don't worry about that.
John Dehlin [00:13:44] Also, if there's any abuse, which we'll get to. It's just the local people. It's people being abusive, not a church.
Kyle Hanks [00:13:50] Right. You'll never blame the system if you can not have a system.
Kari Hanks [00:13:54] Well, even on legal levels, it's hard to hold a church accountable when they're not an organized, registered religion.
John Dehlin [00:14:01] Okay, all right, I'm in. So what's next?
Kyle Hanks [00:14:04] So. So that's. And that's the whole story. They don't have a written doctrine, no written creeds or anything. They use the KJV Bible. It wasn't until we left that I realized the only doctrine they had is a hymnal that they've actually tweaked a few times over the years. But.
Kari Hanks [00:14:22] And they do actually quote and preach from the hymn book quite a lot.
Kyle Hanks [00:14:25] Yeah, they do.
Margi Dehlin [00:14:26] From the hymn book. Yeah. How about the Bible?
Kari Hanks [00:14:30] Yeah, the. The KJV Bible and the hymn book. Those are, like, the two things that they use.
Kyle Hanks [00:14:34] And no other Bible. They. They don't. They'll actually kind of preach against other Bibles. And I'm not sure exactly why, because, again, a common theme Throughout. What we're talking about today is that nothing's written down anywhere.
Margi Dehlin [00:14:44] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:14:45] So it's all word of mouth and it's all oral authority based kind of a little bit. You know, they try not to have an authority structure. They would tell you, but they actually do. And that authority gives you what you're supposed to do. And that leads to some little factioning, you know, as we go. But.
John Dehlin [00:14:59] And I should say the King James version of the Bible is sacred in Mormonism too. It's the one true Bible.
Kyle Hanks [00:15:04] Well, it sounds cool. Yeah, it sounds cool to say all those words in English in Old English. It doesn't matter if you're saying them correctly or not, but it sounds awesome. It does sound very holy. And even in the meetings when we pray publicly, a lot of times people use Old English when they're praying, which is interesting.
Kari Hanks [00:15:21] That's funny, because when we met, that was one thing that bothered me is I would use Old English in my prayers and testimony because I was like very rule oriented and a good girl. And Kyle was much more modern with his language and, like relaxed about it. And that was actually something that bothered me.
John Dehlin [00:15:40] Would it be exploitative to ask you to give us an example what it
Margi Dehlin [00:15:44] sounds like we would use thee and
Kari Hanks [00:15:46] thou in our prayers. Like our Father in heaven. We're thankful for everything.
Margi Dehlin [00:15:51] Oh, I see.
Kari Hanks [00:15:51] The more formal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. More formal. The thou language. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:15:56] And you said you.
Kyle Hanks [00:15:57] And I didn't. I don't. Yeah, I don't know. I didn't really. It wasn't as important to me.
Kari Hanks [00:16:01] I remember. Because it bothered me.
Kyle Hanks [00:16:03] Well, I felt. It felt a little dishonest to me to do that, honestly. And I sort of was okay with people had their traditions or whatever and that that made them feel close to God. Didn't really work for me. And that was okay.
Kari Hanks [00:16:14] Yeah. Even in private prayer where I'm not talking out loud, I'm praying in my own head or my own heart. I was using more formal because we think it's. You're addressing the King of Heaven.
John Dehlin [00:16:23] Yeah. No. We're taught Mormons say thee and thou.
Kyle Hanks [00:16:26] That's interesting.
John Dehlin [00:16:26] Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Okay, Well, I should ask this. Is there any evidence that there's this line of success? Do they claim any evidence of a line of succession from Paul down to the Irish? Was it the. It was founded in Ireland in the 1800s, basically, yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:16:43] We'll talk about him.
John Dehlin [00:16:44] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [00:16:45] I don't think they don't. No, they don't. Not really. It's sort of like, well, we don't really know. We just have faith and we, a lot of times people will say, oh it went underground for years because of persecution, real persecution complex in this group. Any, a lot of different, a lot of different problems that come up. They chalk up to persecution and move on right up to and including the abuse scandal. So any sort of like we don't know our history. Well, it had to go underground. There was persecution or something like that. That's the only thing I've ever heard.
Kari Hanks [00:17:14] But all throughout history you will find with no evidence that there were people meeting in homes just the way that did in the Bible. They issue anything to do with church buildings or even though Jesus preached in temples in the Bible. Yeah, they, they just claim that that happened all throughout history and that that was them continuing.
Kyle Hanks [00:17:36] Yeah, that's. They did it. And then.
Kari Hanks [00:17:38] And there are other religions and other groups that do gather in homes and have Bible studies. But you'll recognize them by their spirit, whether they're the true way or not.
Kyle Hanks [00:17:48] Well, in an honest heart will find us. You know they'll just say stuff like that. And they're not entirely wrong. I mean in the old, in the New Testament there were meetings in homes. If you read into what was going on in some of those letters and stuff. So they find all the verses that match what we do and they really hammer those ones.
John Dehlin [00:18:03] But there's no evidence.
Kyle Hanks [00:18:04] No evidence? No. No actual evidence or even a claim of evidence. No. And because they don't keep any records either. There's no membership records, there's no history records. There's nothing. We were walking around Temple Square. Do you want to talk about that? We were walking around Temple Square yesterday.
Kari Hanks [00:18:17] Yeah, this hit me yesterday. I kind of got emot looking at all the Mormon cultural history because we don't have anything like that. Like when you leave the two by twos you're completely afloat. There's no, I mean when we left there was no support group, there was no community. There were some online that weren't very well administered, administrated.
Kyle Hanks [00:18:39] They weren't just weren't very big yet.
Kari Hanks [00:18:41] They weren't very busy. Like there weren't. There wasn't a lot of activity in those groups and a lot of them were kind of preachy or they allowed current two by twos in there. So it's just a weird mix of scattered groups online. So when we left there was not any support groups or with no written history or you just feel like there's nothing to ground you. There's not even. There wasn't even a way to connect with the X community. Most of us didn't even really use or weren't familiar with the term. Two by two.
John Dehlin [00:19:13] Yeah, you wouldn't know how to find each other because you wouldn't have a name.
Kyle Hanks [00:19:17] There's nothing to Google if there's no
John Dehlin [00:19:19] church, there's no ex church members.
Kyle Hanks [00:19:21] The church has always called things like inside they say we're the truth, we're the way, we're God's children or whatever. Well, none of that Googles, right? That's not a. None of those terms mean anything. So they very sneakily just kept no presence and people know about them. There have been books written about them in the past. I'll talk about those as we go. But there was one book specifically. But, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's so underground that people when they leave will spend years not talking to anybody about it because they don't know how to find people.
John Dehlin [00:19:50] So.
Margi Dehlin [00:19:51] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [00:19:51] So we were walking around, you know, looking at some of the, the Mormon cultural history around here and I was saying to Kyle, like if we were ex Mormon, I would bring my kids to see this. They wouldn't care. They would have been bored on this trip because they're not ex Mormon. But it would be part of their heritage, it would be part of their, their family history. We don't have anything like that because our annual gatherings which we called conventions were done on private property, usually a big farm. So we can't really take them there to show them what that was like. We have no. I mean we have some old photographs and you know, this old hymn book that was handed down in my family. But we don't have anything concrete that we can give them of their history or show them or it's all oral.
John Dehlin [00:20:36] No. And that's the opposite of our church because we could think of ourselves as a record keeping people and we were taking minutes and notes from the very beginning. We set up a corporation from the very beginning, a church structure. And journals. We encouraged everyone to keep journals. So I mean that would be very. And even now Margi is a convert. But I take great pride and identity in my pioneer ancestry, even my polygamous heritage. There's a weird pride that, you know, we were the pioneers who did the hard thing. So like I can totally see how you would feel and we'll get to it. Just unmoored, unanchored, unrooted with, without any documents or structures to kind of have as a frame of reference.
Kari Hanks [00:21:26] Yeah. When you leave Mormonism, you maintain a culture. Is that right? Like, you still can feel culturally Mormon when you leave the x2 by twos, they don't even let you have a name. They pretend that they don't have a founder. I mean, you. You leave with nothing. Like, almost no sense of identity. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:21:41] It's fascinating.
Kari Hanks [00:21:42] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:21:42] If you went and if you told a current member that you'd seen them in the news and they saw a news article that said two by two on it, they would just say, that's not them, because they don't have a name. They only take the name of Jesus.
Kari Hanks [00:21:51] Or they would say, that's Bitter Ex members talking about their group.
John Dehlin [00:21:55] Now, that sounds familiar. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:21:56] Bitter X members is. We wear that with pride.
Founding of the Movement and William Irvine
John Dehlin [00:21:59] So let's jump to the actual founding of the organization.
Kyle Hanks [00:22:02] Yeah. So the actual founding is there's a man named William Irvine back in the late 80s.
John Dehlin [00:22:07] William Irvine.
Kyle Hanks [00:22:08] William Irvine, yeah.
John Dehlin [00:22:09] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [00:22:09] I'm actually. I'm going to a book here. This is a really good book. It's called Preserving the Truth by Cherie
Kari Hanks [00:22:14] Crop Ehrig, published two years ago. So since we left, she put about.
Kyle Hanks [00:22:19] The author put about 30 years of work into this cataloging, just going everywhere she could, looking at news, you know, microfiche or whatever, going through, looking whatever history she could find, which was usually notes that people had passed, letters that had passed, notes in the news.
John Dehlin [00:22:36] What a legend.
Kari Hanks [00:22:37] She went to England, Ireland, Scotland, and kind of retraced the steps of the original workers. She also has a website, tellingthetruth.info which is where she originally started cataloging the history.
John Dehlin [00:22:48] Is she alive?
Kari Hanks [00:22:49] Oh, yeah.
John Dehlin [00:22:50] Have y' all met her?
Kyle Hanks [00:22:51] Haven't met her in person. We've messaged some.
Kari Hanks [00:22:53] No, we've done, like, coinciding, Zoom interviews with her.
John Dehlin [00:22:56] So you've met her in Zoom? You've seen that?
Kari Hanks [00:22:58] Yeah. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:22:58] So she's gone back and found every place that this William Irvine character was mentioned. He was actually part of another evangelical group called the Faith Mission. And the Faith Mission. Excuse me. The Faith Mission still exists today as just sort of an evangelical outreach group, non denominational. They survive on donations, and we've never run across them, but we've noticed, we've looked through some of their stuff online and realized that a lot of the terms they use he William Irvine, who used to be a member, lifted from them and used in our group, and we still use them to this day.
Kari Hanks [00:23:29] And they're not an exclusivist group. Like, they encourage people in whatever local church that they go to.
John Dehlin [00:23:36] Can we do a tiny bit of biographical info on this Irvine guy?
Kari Hanks [00:23:39] Yes. Yeah, yeah, we'll get into it.
Kyle Hanks [00:23:40] We do. So I'm going to be reading a lot because this is all stuff we've learned mostly from this book and in the last few years. Again, we grew up thinking shores of Galilee, so.
John Dehlin [00:23:49] Oh, so you didn't grow up sort of worshiping a founder sort of thing.
Kari Hanks [00:23:53] Nobody intentionally cut the founder out of there.
John Dehlin [00:23:55] No Joseph Smith. Equivalent to the point that they don't
Kari Hanks [00:23:58] even think that they were not founded by a man. That's a point.
Kyle Hanks [00:24:02] It's founded in heaven of pride for them.
John Dehlin [00:24:04] Yeah, that's fascinating.
Kyle Hanks [00:24:05] Yeah, we've seen some of the early workers. We've actually seen letters recently that said this was founded in the Garden of Eden and stuff.
Kari Hanks [00:24:12] I heard the name William Irvine when I was a teenager and I asked my parents about it. And most two by twos just believe that he was a worker who was just another worker and maybe was a particularly influential worker who ended up going rogue, which we'll get into. But he was actually the founder.
John Dehlin [00:24:31] That's mind blowing to de emphasize your founder so that he's not a target for scrutiny. That's brilliant.
Kari Hanks [00:24:38] Well, we'll get into why they wanted to erase him from their history because it was sort of an embarrassing story for them.
John Dehlin [00:24:45] Okay, man, I'm on the edge of my seat. Okay.
Kyle Hanks [00:24:48] So, yeah, he was born in 1863 in Scotland and he joined the faith mission in 1895. And as part of the faith mission, they just have people to go out and preach the gospel, I guess. I don't know what they were doing back then exactly, but they sent him on a mission to Ireland. And so he went to Ireland with a few other merry men and started just preaching the gospel.
John Dehlin [00:25:09] Wait, why are you laughing?
Kari Hanks [00:25:11] Merry men?
John Dehlin [00:25:12] Sorry.
Kari Hanks [00:25:13] Just the terms he uses.
Kyle Hanks [00:25:16] And I'm just picturing them all smiling right around. I think they were on bicycles for this point.
Kari Hanks [00:25:19] It was a bicycle mission at first. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:25:21] And they were just going on faith, preaching the gospel. That was a big thing for him early on was, let's just go in faith. Let's just leave whatever we have, start riding our bikes through the woods.
John Dehlin [00:25:31] And that's very biblical, Jesus says, you know, very. Doesn't Jesus say go in two by twos without person script or something like that?
Kari Hanks [00:25:38] But they ignore the second commission. So the first commission that Jesus sent his apostles out on in Matthew 10 was intended to be temporary. And he said, don't take money with you, leave your script, leave your purse. But then when they came back, he said, now take your script, take your purse and go out and preach to everyone, including the Gentiles. And they ignore the second commission where he said, go ahead and take your belongings and take your money with you. So our workers are homeless. They don't take, they take. Well, they have money, but they claim to not have money. And they only have a suitcase or two that they take with them. They stay in the homes of members.
Margi Dehlin [00:26:16] So they're nomadic.
Kari Hanks [00:26:17] They're nomadic, yeah. They're itinerant.
Kyle Hanks [00:26:18] Somewhat.
John Dehlin [00:26:19] Yeah, itinerant. So I mean, pretty much any biblical church focuses on some things and ignores other things. So definitely on the one hand it is Bible based and New Testament based. On the other hand, like you said, they're hyper focusing in the cherry pick. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:26:37] Skip over inconvenient parts. So yeah. So 1895 is when he started. He went to Ireland and by 1897 he'd kind of split off from them too. He hadn't formally split off from them, he hadn't been kicked out of the faith mission, but he'd been doing his own thing and trying to come up with his own theology, his own doctrine.
Kari Hanks [00:26:55] So that's sort of the date we used to say when the two by twos first started. It was like 1896. 1897.
Kyle Hanks [00:27:01] Yeah. And that's what they were doing. They were going around living in faith and he got a bunch of other guys to come around with him. My Merryman snarky comment was that he had a bunch of other people who liked what he was doing. Really going in faith, really just going to towns that nobody had been to and preaching the gospel on the side of the road somewhere. They, they called them tent missions early on.
Kyle Hanks [00:27:23] And within about eight years he. I don't. Did we have. When he actually got kicked out of the faith mission, it was several years down there. It was years later when they decided to cut ties with him. But he was kind of doing his own thing and he started bringing a lot of people on board, just following him around. And he, he started at first it was all men, but he pretty soon brought on females, women to preach with him.
Kari Hanks [00:27:49] So basically everyone they were converting at that time, in the very beginning, to my understanding, were joining in this bicycle mission. So every convert in the beginning was a worker, including the women.
Kyle Hanks [00:28:01] Yeah. Because he felt that that was the way to have faith is to go out and preach. That's what you just did. And so early on that's all they were doing. They were all just preaching and driving around, you know, going town to town. But of course, that only lasts for so long before you need someplace to stay. And maybe you're running out of food or something.
Kari Hanks [00:28:18] They were sleeping in barns and starving. And they decided it would be good to convert some people who had homes so that we had places to stay as we traveled around.
Kyle Hanks [00:28:27] So that was actually a little bit of a theological tweak, an innovation, we'll say, just to do that. Even in 1905 is the first time that they started preaching exclusivity, meaning. So the faith mission had been come one, come all. If we're Christians, we can all worship together. He had been that way as well. He'd had his tent meetings on the side, but encouraged people to go to other.
Kyle Hanks [00:28:52] Their own houses of worship, too. But if you really, really want to preach God exactly right, come here and we're really preaching, we're really doing it. And by 1905, they had started talking about, well, maybe we're the only ones doing it right. Maybe people should come to us.
Kyle Hanks [00:29:09] And so they were about 10 years into their ministry total when one of the early workers got ahold of a theological book called Natural Laws in the Spiritual World by Henry Drummond. And I don't know anything about that book. I haven't read it. It's an old theology book. But the point of it was that natural order has things that lead to other things and continuous lines. You can always find continuous lines in nature. What about continuous lines in the.
Kyle Hanks [00:29:40] Hey, what we're doing is in the Bible. That means we go back to the beginning. And so they started preaching at that point. About two years after finding that book, they started preaching exclusively. You have to come to us to be saved, Period.
Kari Hanks [00:29:50] And they got the idea of the living witness doctrine from that book. Yeah, the living witness doctrine, meaning one of God's preachers has to preach his word to bring it alive. For you to have salvation, you have to hear it through one of God's ministers. And they decided, we are those ministers. We are the ones you have to hear the gospel preached through to bring you a living salvation.
John Dehlin [00:30:16] Yeah, it's always kind of this franchise model where you gotta go through. Go through them, right?
Kyle Hanks [00:30:20] Yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And they. And they, like I say, up until that point, they. They'd been welcoming to anybody. And now they say, you have to come to us. And about that time, they start switching over and saying people who come to us have to be rebaptized. Through us also. So. And that continues to this day as well.
Kari Hanks [00:30:37] They will not accept other churches baptisms. So you have to be, if you convert to 2 by 2 ISM, you have to be re baptized which I believe is the same in Mormonism.
John Dehlin [00:30:45] Mormons believe no other baptism is legitimate other than a Mormon baptism. 100%.
Kyle Hanks [00:30:50] Yeah. Because you thought you had it before but now you have it for real. So let's recommit.
John Dehlin [00:30:54] Yeah, we take it further. And only Mormon marriages count in heaven too.
Kyle Hanks [00:31:00] So by 1914-19, so 17 years into his ministry, he Irvine, what we kind of learned was that he started to go crazy. He started. It kind of started going to his head a little bit. I think that's my interpretation, just power. And yeah, he decided that not only is he one of the true workers, he's the true worker. In fact he's mentioned in the Bible as one of the two witnesses in Revelation.
Kari Hanks [00:31:26] He and the apostle John. Right, yeah, John and Revelation were. Yeah. So he believed he was a biblical character.
John Dehlin [00:31:34] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:31:34] So the worker said that he lost his anointing. And anointing doesn't really mean anything tangible. It's just a. You're anointed because you God is speaking through you. And they sidelined him a little bit. He wanted to be the leader of everybody. A lot of the ministers thought we should be a little more, we should all have the same power. We shouldn't have one person at the head of us. And there was even a fraction a faction back then. And I'm going to mention the other person because it does come up when you Google there's a man named Edward Cooney, C O O N E N E Y and he believed that Irvine was going the wrong way.
Kari Hanks [00:32:10] He wanted. Yeah, he wanted the ministry to be more equitable where there wasn't a higher egalitarian.
Kyle Hanks [00:32:17] Yeah, yeah. So and that, that ended up, long story short, that ended up in a spin off, I think he ended up in Australia. So when you look us up online a lot of times you'll see the word cuneite because he started with William Irvine and then spun off.
Kari Hanks [00:32:30] And Kuneyites exist but they're not the same thing as two by twos. People often use those terms interchangeably. But Kunaites are their own split off faction and there's only like a couple of hundred members left from our understanding.
John Dehlin [00:32:43] Reminds me of the Monty Python Life of Brian skit. The Judean People's Front versus the People's Front of Judea. We're not the People's Front of Judea. We're the Judean People's Front, Right?
Kyle Hanks [00:32:53] Yeah. There's a South park sketch in there somewhere, too. So by 1919, Irvine had separated from the church and had gone to Jerusalem. So from 1897, from 1897 to 1919, he started this gigantic movement. And at this point there were hundreds.
Kari Hanks [00:33:09] I think they were worldwide too. They spread out very quickly in the early 1900s to Australia, New Zealand, Europe, South Africa. The ministers were spreading out pretty quickly.
John Dehlin [00:33:21] And that's very similar to Mormonism, because almost immediately Joseph Smith is sending missionaries all over the world.
Kyle Hanks [00:33:26] Yeah, same thing.
John Dehlin [00:33:26] So that weird late 1800s, early 1900s, I guess everyone's just sitting around needing churches. And so, like missionaries were just converting everybody like crazy to these weird homespun religions all over the world.
Margi Dehlin [00:33:39] Yep.
Kyle Hanks [00:33:40] Yeah. And whatever the latest preacher was in town tended to grab some people and then, you know, whoever had them in their church last got all upset about it and they'd fight and stuff. But yeah, that was the earliest, the oldest convention grounds. We'll talk about what a convention is in a minute. But it's sort of a gathering place for our people and annually goes back to 1911 in Washington state.
Kari Hanks [00:34:02] And it's still running. It's the oldest one that is still
Kyle Hanks [00:34:06] continuing in the U.S. wait, they've sold it.
John Dehlin [00:34:08] It comes to Washington in 1911.
Kyle Hanks [00:34:11] Earlier than that, probably.
Kari Hanks [00:34:12] They came to the U.S. and Canada in the early 1900s, but they established the first convention, which is like our. It's like our General Conference, but only in person.
John Dehlin [00:34:21] And y' all both grew up in Washington? Yes.
Kari Hanks [00:34:23] So that was my home convention, mill town. It's the oldest running, still continuing convention in the United States.
John Dehlin [00:34:32] So Washington is kind of your Utah.
Kari Hanks [00:34:36] I would say that the Pacific Northwest in general has the most dense population of two by twos. Definitely out of the US Worldwide, there's. They seem to be more scattered and rural.
John Dehlin [00:34:49] Is Scotland, Ireland.
Kari Hanks [00:34:51] The thing is have members, but I would say mostly kind of rural.
Kyle Hanks [00:34:56] Yeah, we don't. Again, we don't have. We don't carry history. We don't put milestones in for ourselves.
Kari Hanks [00:35:01] They don't tracking thing.
Kyle Hanks [00:35:03] Yeah, we don't have. We don't have a Nauvoo. We don't have a. You know, we don't have any of those things because we also were raised thinking this is equal. Throughout the world, anywhere you go, you'll find our people.
Kyle Hanks [00:35:16] That's sort of true. What actually happened, and this is my own interpretation through reading this history book, is that William Irvine had a lot of. He had a lot of his early guys and he scattered them around the world and then they stayed there. Cooney in Australia, we grew up hearing about a guy named Jack Carroll in western United States. In George Walker. Eastern United States would be George Walker. There's these. I'm just saying those names because when two by twos, watch this, they'll know what I'm talking about. So I know I'm talking about you.
Kyle Hanks [00:35:47] He sort of. I can't think of the word, but he had these lieutenants that just went around and started. And so they all have these sort of downlines of more ministers. And the ministers who offered, went to them and said, I'd like to join you in your ministry. And so around the world, it's a little bit localized in that sense. Not local, local, but say western us, Eastern US or so there's territories, kind of. Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:36:09] And area authorities or general authorities over regions.
Kyle Hanks [00:36:13] Right?
Margi Dehlin [00:36:14] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [00:36:14] But I would say where we grew up was probably one of the most populated areas in the world for two by twos. And I thought it was that way everywhere. So when I heard people in the eastern US were driving one to two hours for a Sunday morning meeting, I was mind blown. I didn't know that that was the thing because our convention when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, had upwards of 1000 to 1200 people at the annual convention. So those were the numbers I was used to.
John Dehlin [00:36:44] Has anyone tried to figure out where there's the most dense populations of 2 by twos in the world?
Kari Hanks [00:36:51] Nobody has figured it out. But there are worker lists that are published in the church, not published, passed around internally in the church. And you can kind of guess based on how many workers are in one area, how many, what we would call friends are also there. And I would definitely say the Pacific Northwest is one of the most densely populated up into northern western Canada as well.
John Dehlin [00:37:13] But any other regions in the world that come to mind just because there
Kari Hanks [00:37:16] are a lot in Australia.
John Dehlin [00:37:18] Okay.
Kari Hanks [00:37:19] And they're worldwide, they're everywhere, but not as. As populated.
John Dehlin [00:37:24] Okay, I agree.
Kari Hanks [00:37:25] All right. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:37:26] And I don't know why exactly. East coast is less than less.
Kari Hanks [00:37:28] And Washington had four conventions. So when I say ours had 1200 on a Sunday, there were also how many conventions in the state? Four. Five.
Kyle Hanks [00:37:37] Four. Yeah, five or six with 10 drivers.
Kari Hanks [00:37:39] He grew up going to a different convention just south of us, closer to Olympia.
John Dehlin [00:37:42] Got it. Okay.
Kyle Hanks [00:37:44] Yeah. So Irvine himself eventually got excommunicated. We've never had a formal Excommunication process, because we don't have formal process of any kind of. But he eventually was kicked out of the church and he retired to Jerusalem because he still thought he was going to get called up in the Rapture or whatever.
Kari Hanks [00:38:02] And there were some people still who stayed loyal to him, who he basically instructed or commanded through letters. So there also is another spinoff faction called Ervinites that are very small in number, but they exist out there.
John Dehlin [00:38:19] And you all know there's like a thousand different branches of Mormon breakoffs, right?
Kyle Hanks [00:38:24] Yeah. These groups can't help themselves.
Kari Hanks [00:38:25] So at this point, the two by two started very purposefully cutting him out of their history to the point that they would take photographs with multiple workers in them and cut him out of the photograph. And they would be preaching about some of the early workers and they would name them. And then when they got to William Irvine, they wouldn't name him. They would say that Scottish worker. So we grew up really not knowing the name. We would hear names of early workers in the US Like Kyle was saying, Jack Carroll or George Walker. People would look up to these people as early kind of overseers, but they would not acknowledge a founder.
John Dehlin [00:39:08] So that's the whitewashing of history, which we share in common.
Kyle Hanks [00:39:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's. And they, again, with the whole apostolic succession and living witness doctrine, it has to be spoken this way. That only makes sense if it goes all the way back to the beginning, if you don't acknowledge a founder. So we. Yeah, we didn't know. I knew the name Jack Carroll because he was the oldest. He went as far back as you could go in our region. No one ever really talked about what happened before that. Oh, well, he came from Europe. Question.
Kari Hanks [00:39:37] He's an Irish worker. Buried. There's a cemetery right next to the Milltown Convention grounds in Washington that has a lot of older workers, kind of like the legendary ones. And Jack Carroll's buried up there.
John Dehlin [00:39:51] Interesting. Okay. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:39:53] So that. That just continued on. They successfully never had a name. They tried to. They just, in their little announcements that they would give a town as they went town to town, they would say, we're just here to preach Jesus. We only take the name of Jesus. We're not one of those churches that takes money. They will accept donations, but they don't require it. You don't have to tithe. So we've never had formal tithing.
Kyle Hanks [00:40:15] And so the news. The news oftentimes would see these guys come in and want to take a. Write a little newspaper article about Them, which is all the history we have. And that book that I showed earlier does a really good job of going back and finding all that information.
Kyle Hanks [00:40:28] And they have all kinds of names. Well, tramp preachers they call them, because they were just tramping around, I guess, go preachers black stockings for a while. Because for a while one of them decided women should have black stockings, so they just wore black stockings. The traditions come and go a little bit because again, it's oral tradition only. And as people spread out, it's very hard to connect. You know, Pre Internet Day 100 years ago, there's no way to connect all the dots on those things. So you see little. Little doctrinal shifts, little traditional shifts. And so as you travel around the world, you'll find those.
Kyle Hanks [00:40:57] And they're kind of surprising because you're raised to think this is a worldwide thing that goes all the way back to. To Jesus himself. And then you travel to another part of the country and they do things a little bit differently. And you're a little surprised by that. So, yeah, all of that. Everything we just said from Orley Mervine on down, we've learned within the last five years.
The Name, Beliefs, and Practices
Kari Hanks [00:41:15] But the name Two by Two was first published over 100 years ago by outside publications like journals or newspapers in Ireland that were kind of following this group and educating. Now they're in this group town and now they're preaching in this town and they're moving around and kind of keeping people up to date on what was going on with them. They started using the term two by twos.
John Dehlin [00:41:37] Were they. Were you able to find instances in the history where they were looked upon with disfavor, scandal, you know, that sort of thing.
Kari Hanks [00:41:48] Those early publications that were calling them Two by Twos were criticizing how they did baptisms and.
John Dehlin [00:41:55] But was more theological.
Kari Hanks [00:41:58] Some of it was theological, but some of it was these people are coming in here and disrupting the town and riling people up and preaching in their tent missions.
Kyle Hanks [00:42:07] Yeah, because they were preaching that at this point, as they spread through the US especially early 1900s, part of their message was, all of your previous religious views are wrong.
Kari Hanks [00:42:16] You all are going to hell. We are right. You're going to hell.
Kyle Hanks [00:42:19] Especially clergy.
Kari Hanks [00:42:20] People don't like to hear that.
Kyle Hanks [00:42:22] William especially. But then his lieutenants as well, started preaching very directly that all of the clergy you've listened to before, those guys are going straight to hell. We're doing it the only correct way. We're going by faith. And so, yeah, it riled people up a little Bit. Especially clergy members.
John Dehlin [00:42:37] Yeah. And a lot of LDS opposition in New York, Kirtland, Ohio, and Nauvoo, Illinois. Was people being offended at our truth claims. Yeah, you know, among other things. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So it was mostly theological or just competitive opposition.
Margi Dehlin [00:42:58] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [00:42:58] Because I don't find. They weren't really doing much. They were just preaching by the side of the road, often in tents or barns or something. They weren't really. They weren't building church buildings. They weren't taking over politics. They've always been very separate from politics. So in that sense, they weren't riling people up. It was just pulling people away from other churches.
Kari Hanks [00:43:13] They were very fire and brimming. So, yeah, the town's clergy wouldn't like that.
John Dehlin [00:43:17] I'm going to just say, and this will be slightly repetitive. It sounds. You know, the common criticism against religions, and specifically high demand religions or cults, is they're about sex, power and money. And it really sounds like this church was intentionally set up to not be about money, to not be about sex. Cause I think your itinerant preachers are supposed to be celibate. Not about sex, not about money, and not about power. Cause there's no formal power structure. I mean, clearly there are gonna be power dynamics. But it sounds like it was set up to avoid those three main trappings, which is actually, at least in its intention, kind of cool.
Kari Hanks [00:44:02] I think the harm in the beginning came from the exclusivity. And that brings in the power dynamics of, you have to. To hear from us to have salvation. There's going to be some power that comes into play there.
John Dehlin [00:44:15] I mean, that's the ultimate power, ironically.
Kari Hanks [00:44:17] William Irvine. I think one of the reasons why. And I might be reading into this, but in my opinion, one of the reasons why celibacy in the ministry was so important to him was because he had an illegitimate son, we believe. I don't know if this has ever been proven, but legend has it that he had an illegitimate son and that was one of his greater sins that he regretted. So he really wanted a celibate ministry. And then as far as money, I don't really know how it was back in the early days.
Kyle Hanks [00:44:49] Do you know, they had donation boxes at their meeting sites, at their tents or whatever. They'd have a donation box in the back and people could give if they wanted to.
Kari Hanks [00:44:58] And when we were growing up, it was always cash under the table. Like you shake a weight worker's hand and you might have a $50 bill, you know, not me as A kid, but like an. A man who's an elder might have a $50 bill in his hand and hands it to the worker when he's shaking his hand after a gospel meeting. Or like. One thing Kyle and I did was when we had the workers staying in our homes, we would put some money in an envelope and leave it on their bed.
John Dehlin [00:45:21] So money comes in, money comes into it.
Kyle Hanks [00:45:23] Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't. You gotta eat. So.
John Dehlin [00:45:26] But my point is it's engineered to try and keep those influences to minimize. Other than the exclusive truth claims, which is maximum power and control.
Margi Dehlin [00:45:37] The control pieces there very early.
Kyle Hanks [00:45:40] Yeah, but the messaging is really good, though. It addresses, like you're saying, it addresses the main concerns of established religions. So when people hear it. This will be part of my story later. But one of my grandparents found it because he was looking for something that wasn't corrupted. He went looking for something that just looked like pure people. Yeah, Purely just going in faith, preaching the gospel. Of course, the early ministers had a lot of problems with that, such as starving, not finding food, not finding places to stay, getting sick, things like that. But they continued on in faith, and that sells to people who are looking for that kind of thing.
Kyle Hanks [00:46:13] So the history of Irvine sort of rounds out with the last little bit I would say is that he originally everybody was ministers, and after he had started inviting women preachers, they also had married couples, too. And that's something I didn't know until the last couple years past. Workers, yeah, married couples in some cases left their children behind with family members to go preach.
Kari Hanks [00:46:35] They were not allowed to bring their children. So if they were married with kids, they would have to. Basically, their kids would have to be raised by relatives. So when you go into the work, it's like. It's very similar to a Mormon mission, but it's for life. You don't usually leave the work. People can and do, but it's looked down upon.
John Dehlin [00:46:54] So what you learned recently is that some of the couples that would go out in twos would be male and female and were married. Do you know if they were celibate as married?
Kari Hanks [00:47:05] No, they were. Probably wouldn't have been.
John Dehlin [00:47:07] Okay. But that would have been information withheld from you that there used to be married couples growing up.
Kari Hanks [00:47:14] That's something we kind of were. I was always sort of generally aware of that, but I never really wondered why it wasn't allowed anymore. Yeah, because that definitely changed when we were young. I think the last married couple to go into the work was in the 1960s. And then after that, there was very direct communication from the workers that they would no longer be allowing married workers. If you wanted to marry, you had to leave the work.
John Dehlin [00:47:41] And just the existence of some change that. A systemic change. You're both smiling. Is an indication that there's a power structure and some ultimate authority making decisions. Right.
Kari Hanks [00:47:52] Well, it's funny because they preach against change. They don't like the idea of change. They don't like the idea of growth. That's a worldly thing. Like churches that change their minds. In fact, they would point to Mormonism and say, they used to allow this, but now. Or they didn't used to allow this, but now they do as an example of like, look, worldly churches change. They change their mind and they can just like decree a new doctrine. And it is so. And we don't do that, but they actually did.
Kyle Hanks [00:48:17] Okay, so. Yeah, so that's. I think that kind of closes out the Irvine story. And so it's continued on. Still goes around today, workers traveling in pairs, the different regions. Now we'll start talking maybe a little bit about what it looks like now the ministry still goes around just like it did, mostly just staying in homes of members now because that's more functional. They don't stay in an open barn anymore. They'll. They'll go to members houses and stay. And the regions have gotten a little smaller. So there will be an overseer worker. There'll just be one older brother worker.
Kyle Hanks [00:48:53] There'll just be one older brother worker ahead of over a group and over an area, a geographical area. So, like where we were raised was Washington. And so just for. As an example, Washington, northern Idaho and Alaska was under one overseer. He was probably one of the older brothers. He wasn't too old, but old and seasoned. And under him would be all of the pairs of workers in that area and they would be divided up into fields, they called them. So they're the harvest. They always talk about going out in the harvest field and finding, you know, needy souls. And so those. That'll be those. Each of those fields will be an area of maybe several towns or something, a couple counties, something like that.
Kari Hanks [00:49:34] When we were growing up, a field was usually one to 200 people, something like that. So about 100 people per pair of workers.
Kyle Hanks [00:49:41] Yeah, and they'll just assign workers to an area and they'll stay there for about a year and then they'll. The overseer will rewrite the list and shuffle people around and the pairs will get switched up. They don't usually Stay. The pairs don't usually stay together. And yeah, that's how, that's, that's the transition into now. And they've been doing that for, you know, close to 100 years.
John Dehlin [00:50:00] And then the local meetings, sort of Sunday school teachings, sacrament, all that kind of stuff.
Kari Hanks [00:50:09] So meetings Sunday. So we'd have three meetings a week. Sunday morning, which is where you have the sacrament. We would call the emblems. So we would use grape juice and bread. And that was considered the most important part of the meeting, which is at the end of the meeting, where anyone who has been baptized can partake in the emblems. So Sunday morning meetings and Mormons started
John Dehlin [00:50:28] with wine in bread and then they moved to grape juice in bread and then they moved to water.
Kari Hanks [00:50:33] Some areas of the world, like most of Europe and I think Australia, use wine, but because oftentimes the two by twos baptize younger teenagers in the US they use grape juice so that everyone can, can partake in it who has been baptized.
Kari Hanks [00:50:48] So Sunday mornings would be in someone's home. Meetings are always in a home of where we grew up. And I understand not everyone grew up with this many two by twos around them, but when we were growing up, there were like between 20 to 40 people in the home. And they would set up chairs in the person's living room, folding chairs usually. And you come in and you sit kind of around the living room in a circle.
Kari Hanks [00:51:12] And you have each person who has professed their desire to serve God, which we call professing or joining the two by twos. Usually you profess when you're. We've heard as young as 6. Normally it's between 8 to 12. Is when kids. Professional.
John Dehlin [00:51:31] That's like the equivalent of being saved.
Kari Hanks [00:51:33] Yes, that's joining. Yeah. You're professing your desire to serve God for the rest of your life or joining the two by twos.
John Dehlin [00:51:41] And is that when baptism happens?
Kari Hanks [00:51:43] No, baptism would be when you're a teenager. And that's. It's. They can they kind of compare it to like getting engaged versus getting married. When you profess, you're committing to God, but baptism is like really sealing the deal.
John Dehlin [00:51:57] Okay.
Kari Hanks [00:51:58] So if you're baptized and you leave meetings, it's really. You're not looking at a, at a pretty eternity. So Sunday mornings you would, you would pray and give a testimony if you have professed. So you. And they never separate children and adults. Younger kids sit with the general congregation always. And then Wednesday nights they have.
John Dehlin [00:52:20] Okay, wait, can I ask a question?
Kari Hanks [00:52:21] Yeah.
John Dehlin [00:52:22] So is it like three or four families? Basically 20 people?
Kyle Hanks [00:52:25] Yeah, it can be. They try to just split them up evenly through a few different homes. So it depends. We were raised in an area that had a lot of us, so we would probably have. Yeah, three or four families plus some older people. Yeah, they don't divide them up by age at all. It's just kind of. It's somewhat geographical and in a town. The town I grew up in had quite a few. I think there were two or three Sunday morning meetings and the workers would tell us which one to go to. They would assign an elder of a home and then they would tell who to go.
John Dehlin [00:52:50] Oh, wait, so you don't get to pick which families.
Kyle Hanks [00:52:53] You don't. And that was actually.
Kari Hanks [00:52:57] That was actually one of our small cracks. We like to use the Mormon analogy of the shelf. That was something we put on our shelf because when we. When we had kids, they assigned us to a meeting that was much farther away. And we passed one or two meetings on the way to get there. And we had little kids and, you know, the kids would get tired and it was just. It felt like much more of a hassle to drive past two meetings that were closer to us to go to this one farther away. But yeah, you don't get to choose. They assign the meetings. They choose who is worthy of having a meeting in their. In their home, which we call elders, normally a married couple.
John Dehlin [00:53:36] So elders are people that have been deemed worthy to hold meetings in their home.
Kyle Hanks [00:53:39] Yeah. By the workers assigned to them.
John Dehlin [00:53:41] Yeah, by the missionaries. By the workers.
Kyle Hanks [00:53:43] By the local missionaries. And like we say, those change year to year, though. You'll have two in your area, then the next year you'll have two more. But each pair has the same authority. They can come in and change things around.
John Dehlin [00:53:52] And it's basically your assignments per area.
Kyle Hanks [00:53:54] For the workers it is. Yeah.
Kari Hanks [00:53:56] But not for elders. You can have a meeting in your home indefinitely unless you do something that they don't like. They don't like, and then they can remove it.
John Dehlin [00:54:03] So that's a dishonor if you removed
Kyle Hanks [00:54:06] it, if you lose your meeting. Yeah. They don't write anything down, though. So it's. It can be anything from. From. They found out you were living a double life and doing terrible things to your wife. Cut her hair.
Kari Hanks [00:54:16] We have heard of a meeting very recently, within the last couple of years being removed from a home in Canada because the wife cut her hair too short.
John Dehlin [00:54:25] So women having long hair is an important thing.
Kari Hanks [00:54:27] Yeah. You don't cut your Hair. We'll get into that.
Kyle Hanks [00:54:29] Yeah, we'll talk the meetings, then we'll talk about it.
Kari Hanks [00:54:32] So then there's Wednesday night Bible studies, which are less formal, but same setup. You still sit in a circle in the living room and you give a prayer and a testimony, but you don't have the emblems, the sacrament in Wednesday night Bible study. And those studies are. You're given a list which the workers assign. Normally they'll have you read through either a book in the Bible, so you're reading one chapter each week, and then you read it before the meeting, and then you go and discuss it in the meeting in your testimony, or they'll have a topic like the sower and the seed or something, and then you read through that for a month or so.
Kari Hanks [00:55:06] And then gospel meetings are Sunday afternoons and those are structured differently. So you would go to a rented hall like a library or a school or funeral home, some public place, and you sit and listen to the workers preach to you for an hour. Those are the Gospels.
John Dehlin [00:55:24] So there's two Sunday meetings, two Sunday
Kari Hanks [00:55:26] meetings and one Wednesday meeting.
Kyle Hanks [00:55:28] And those second meetings are kind of the mission. It's the continuation of what they've been doing since William Irvine, which is the pair will go find some public place and preach to for an hour. And those are open to the public. They're always done in public places. They're not advertised real well, but because especially where we've been in Seattle and the Phoenix area, there's so many people, you can fill up a room pretty easily. So they don't advertise very well.
Kari Hanks [00:55:49] They don't actually proselytize very much because they're so worried about being discovered. They value their secrecy so much that they don't proselytize very often. You don't often get converts.
Kyle Hanks [00:56:01] So what started as a very successful set of missionaries growing this church in the last few years, at least in our lifetime, has changed to just preaching to the flock, mostly staying in their homes. Yeah, they've got plenty of people with open homes for them.
Kari Hanks [00:56:18] And actually in our grandparents generation, they would hold more than three meetings a week. They would often have gospel meetings every evening when they were going into a new area and trying to more purposefully recruit members.
John Dehlin [00:56:31] Can I blow your mind for a second? Mormons used to have two Sunday meetings, one in the morning and one in the afternoon or evening, and then one on Wednesdays.
Kari Hanks [00:56:40] Well, they were on the right track, but somewhere they were close.
Kyle Hanks [00:56:42] They didn't quite have it, but in
John Dehlin [00:56:44] my lifetime they got Rid of the second Sunday meeting and consolidated it into a three hour meeting.
Kyle Hanks [00:56:50] Yeah, well, if they.
John Dehlin [00:56:51] It's a two hour meeting.
Kyle Hanks [00:56:51] If they were honest, they would find our preachers then, as we were often told.
John Dehlin [00:56:55] We're getting indoctrinated already. Okay. Anyway, that's interesting. Okay.
Kyle Hanks [00:57:01] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [00:57:01] So each, so each meeting is an hour during the week. And then our annual convention is four days. So you would go and take work off, take school off, whatever you need to do to be there for the whole four days. Ours, where we grew up, started Wednesday night and then went all the way through Sunday afternoon. And they have three meetings a day. The morning meeting is two hours, the afternoon meeting is two hours and the evening meeting is an hour. And you're sitting on really hard wooden benches, usually in like a tent or an old barn that they've cleaned out for it or something like that and listening to the workers preach.
Conventions, Dress Codes, and Community Rules
John Dehlin [00:57:42] So again, our general conferences are twice a year, but it used to be. And it's Saturdays and Sundays only. But it used to be three two hour meetings on Saturday and then two two hour meetings on Sunday.
Kari Hanks [00:57:54] So the difference I think with our convention is once you're on the convention grounds, you don't have to leave. They provide all of your food and they provide sleeping quarters, usually in an old barn. And they'll separate men and women in the sleeping quarters. They'll have a nursery for mothers to go with their babies to sleep, or their young kids. Or you can bring a tent or a camper and bring it onto the grounds and sleep.
John Dehlin [00:58:16] Fascinating. Yeah, that's once a year.
Kyle Hanks [00:58:19] Once a year. And there's a bunch of them and they don't all go at the same time. They, they rotate through because the ministers travel from. To each one. Or we'll go on a tour of several of them. So yeah, they'll bring workers in from
Kari Hanks [00:58:32] overseas for convention rounds. So usually in a geographical area, conventions are scheduled in a way that they stagger but are close together. So the workers from overseas can hit 7, 8 conventions before they go back to their country.
Kyle Hanks [00:58:48] It's become very American centric, we like to say overseas for places we can't. It is US centric, we can't drive to.
Kari Hanks [00:58:55] There is like a mini convention that we call special meetings six months up away from convention. So it's not the same as convention though. It's like one day with the three meetings and you bring a packed lunch and then you leave at the end of the day. Just like a mini convention.
John Dehlin [00:59:11] Yeah, okay, I'm getting it. Yeah. So you've got your equivalent to general authorities that are going around in the main annual convention, in the mini convention, as like the keynote speakers to kind of really lay down the good stuff.
Kyle Hanks [00:59:25] Yeah, yeah. I think almost all of them have a little part. The women have a very short part. The men can go on for quite a while.
Kari Hanks [00:59:32] Women never lead the meeting. So there is a hierarchy. I don't know if we've. Yeah, a patriarchy. Yeah, definitely. So sister workers would speak first and the shortest, and then. And then a male brother worker would lead the meeting, which means he has a longer time to speak at the end, and he closes the meeting out. And then you have overseers, which are always men and usually older men. And the overseers are still workers, but they oversee a larger geographical area, which I think you mentioned.
John Dehlin [01:00:03] Yeah, yeah.
Kyle Hanks [01:00:04] And they make all the final decisions, too. If anything, if a question comes up, it pretty much goes to them and they tell you yes or no. And that could mean, as we'll talk about a little bit later, that could mean they say something that's the opposite of what everybody else is doing, but you got to do it. They're the ones most led by God, according to them.
Kari Hanks [01:00:22] And they assign fields where workers go. Like workers can't usually choose where they want to labor. We call it. The overseers would assign that.
John Dehlin [01:00:31] Such a creepy term, overseer, by the way.
Kari Hanks [01:00:33] It is creepy.
John Dehlin [01:00:34] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [01:00:34] It's one of those things. We had so many terms that we grew up with. Terms and concepts that we grew up with is just second nature. We don't think about it. And we get a lot of that feedback when we talk about it. People kind of recoil and go, that's. That's a weird thing to say. And it's like, oh, yeah, it is kind of weird. I never thought about it.
John Dehlin [01:00:47] Maybe doctrine, theology, Real quick, behavioral practice.
Kyle Hanks [01:00:52] So theology is non Trinity. We don't believe in the Trinity. And that has changed. Originally they did, which is interesting. We just, within the last, what, month or two, figured that out, that some of the early ministers were teaching that God is the Godhead of three, whatever. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Nowadays they don't teach that. They teach that there's three separate entities.
Kyle Hanks [01:01:14] And they like to really accentuate things that other people don't talk about. So it kind of makes us separate. They love to say that we're in the world, but we're not of the world, meaning we don't live on a compound. Although that might have been preferable in some cases. But we don't We. We go to school with everybody else. We work with everybody else. For the men, it's actually kind of hard to tell who's who. We just look sort of Mormon. For the women, it's. The women are much more noticeable. Maybe you should talk about that.
Kari Hanks [01:01:47] Yeah. Men basically just have to have short hair, be clean cut most of the time. I mean, they can have beards, but no tattoos, no jewelry, except, like a watch and wedding band. Women, when I was growing up, did not. You do not cut your hair. And some women would have very long hair, especially sister workers.
Margi Dehlin [01:02:07] Like, no trims. It's not just have long hair. It's. You can't cut your hair.
Kari Hanks [01:02:11] I was allowed to trim to keep my hair healthy because that would make it grow longer. Like, you can cut the dead ends off of your hair, but you can't cut length off of your hair.
Kyle Hanks [01:02:24] It depends how different families. Again, nothing's ever written down at all. So everyone has a little bit of interpretation as far as how far they want to take different things. So this will come up a lot in our stories of how we kind of grew up with different traditions or whatever. Some families absolutely never even get scissors near a woman's hair. And women have to wear dresses and skirts all the time.
Kari Hanks [01:02:45] I never cut my hair until we started deconstructing. No makeup, no jewelry, no piercings of any kind.
John Dehlin [01:02:53] For women, no earrings.
Kari Hanks [01:02:54] No earrings at all. No piercings, no necklaces, no makeup, no dyeing your hair.
Margi Dehlin [01:03:01] It's like unadorned.
Kari Hanks [01:03:02] Unadorned. That's.
Margi Dehlin [01:03:03] That's.
Kari Hanks [01:03:04] Yeah, that's what they would say.
Kyle Hanks [01:03:05] And the women also wear their hair on top of their heads. Especially the adult women. Married women. Yeah. One of the sort of derogatory terms or nickname terms that people came up with for us early on was the buns and skirts or bun heads, because the women always had dresses and skirts on and had their hair up on top of their heads. And that's a. There's a verse, something about women preaching with their heads covered. And that's just where we fell on that one. Some churches will say that you should wear a head covering. We decided the hair should literally be up on top of your head.
Kari Hanks [01:03:36] And then modest. Modest dress. Jean skirts were a big thing for us. Like for floor length jean skirts, usually some families allowed pants outside of meetings, like to school or to work. Well, usually not work. If you're an adult. Two by two woman, you're wearing a skirt or a dress. Like, I rarely saw my mom in pants. Even if I see her in pants today. It surprises me, but I was allowed to wear pants around the home and to school. A lot of families didn't allow that. But in the meeting setting or when workers or other two by twos are around, you're always in a dress or a skirt.
John Dehlin [01:04:09] What about swimsuits?
Kari Hanks [01:04:11] We were allowed to wear swimsuits, but they had to be modest.
John Dehlin [01:04:16] No bikinis.
Kari Hanks [01:04:19] I mean, I've seen two by two girls in bikinis, but I would not have felt comfortable in a bikini myself. I was a rule follower, so that would have made me uncomfortable.
John Dehlin [01:04:29] What about dietary restrictions or sexual.
Kari Hanks [01:04:33] No alcohol, no. No smoking, no drugs. There weren't a lot of other dietary things other than those. What was the other question you asked?
John Dehlin [01:04:43] Sexual rules.
Kari Hanks [01:04:44] Yeah. No sex before marriage. And if you're a worker, you're celibate. And that was something that you could. There's different. They don't excommunicate. There's no official process. But you could be asked to stop taking part in the meetings or stop taking part of the emblems or not come to the meetings. If you. If they found out that you were living with someone or you had sex before marriage or you were gay or anything like that. And it really depends on the workers. It's whatever vibes the worker wants to go with. As far as we've heard for the LGBTQ community, anywhere from you can sit and listen and not take part or just don't act on it to. You are no longer allowed to attend meetings at all, which means you're going to hell.
John Dehlin [01:05:32] And can you be demoted as a worker if you misstep? Can you be removed kind of from the.
Kari Hanks [01:05:38] You can be kicked out of the work. Oh, yeah. Yep.
Margi Dehlin [01:05:40] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:05:40] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [01:05:41] Or put on a pause. Sometimes we've heard of a worker or two being asked to just take a break for a year because resting the Resting. Yeah. Lots of little euphemisms for can't preach right now.
John Dehlin [01:05:51] And regular members. Adults just have regular jobs and just do their job.
Kyle Hanks [01:05:56] Church stuff among you.
Kari Hanks [01:05:57] They would preach a lot that you're in the world, but not of the world. So you are supposed to be separate kind of mentally and emotionally from your peers, especially at school. Like, making friendships at school is something that we'll individually talk about in our stories.
Margi Dehlin [01:06:12] But that's a Mormon thing, too.
Kari Hanks [01:06:15] That quote, in the world, not as the world.
John Dehlin [01:06:17] Oh, a thousand percent. Not of the world. In the world. Not of the world. Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [01:06:22] Yeah. They teach us that we're the potentially the only light anyone ever sees. They're very exclusive. So they'll teach kids, very small kids. I remember hearing from early on that, you know, don't put your candle under a bushel. You might be the only light that the world sees. You might be the light, the only Bible they read. Yeah, yeah, sorry.
Kari Hanks [01:06:38] That anyone ever reads.
Kyle Hanks [01:06:39] Yeah. So we carry. From a very early age, we carry that responsibility of being like, we're right. Everybody else probably needs to see us.
John Dehlin [01:06:47] But a weird twist is not being very missionary minded.
Margi Dehlin [01:06:50] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [01:06:50] Yeah. And the thing is, is they say they are. That's a kind of a thing that. That's one of those really obvious things that I didn't think about until well into adulthood. And I will talk about it later maybe, but I have talked to a few workers who have stepped aside on their own, and that's one of the things that kind of bugged them a little bit, is they realized they got into the work and they just kind of bounced around from friend's house to friend's house. And maybe they would have a project to go to somebody's private property where there's a convention, and then they would go work on that a little bit and do something, upgrade a restroom or something.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:19] And they weren't actually doing any evangelizing, but they do tell us that we're supposed to evangelize, and they really encourage us to invite people to meetings. So now and then there were times where you would have a worker who really wanted to evangelize and they would put. They would put little announcements on cards or something that said, hey, come to our.
Kari Hanks [01:07:37] I brought some.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:37] Yeah, come to our Bible mission. We're just preaching Jesus. We don't take a collection. Come on down.
Kari Hanks [01:07:43] They used to do that.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:45] They don't do that much anymore.
Kari Hanks [01:07:46] They used to do that a lot when we were younger. They would even sometimes take kids with them and go door to door and knock on people's doors.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:52] Yeah, I did that one time.
Kari Hanks [01:07:52] Or they'd put adverts in a newspaper.
John Dehlin [01:07:54] The obvious extreme example is Jehovah's Witnesses.
Kyle Hanks [01:07:57] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:07:58] Just part of being a Jehovah's Witness is to constantly go out on Saturdays or whatever.
Kari Hanks [01:08:03] Yeah. And they don't really do that anymore. So my great aunt was in the work and I have some of her old photo albums.
Kyle Hanks [01:08:11] We didn't have the formal go out and preach like a Jehovah's Witness, but we did have the. Make sure you're on your best behavior all the time. Make sure. Sure. Make sure that people think highly of God because of you. We Heard when I was younger that don't worry about what people think about you because of God, but worry about what people think of God because of you. So we were constantly carrying this example of truth to the world.
Kari Hanks [01:08:32] So I have this, see if I can. It's going to be hard to see, but I'll read it. This is from the 1940s. It says special gospel services beginning Sunday, May 13th in the. And then there's an address each Sunday, 7:30pm Tuesday and Friday, 8:00pm we urge everyone to come and make these services a blessing. And then it has the names of the. The sister workers on it.
John Dehlin [01:08:55] Got it. All right, well, anything else is kind of crucial to the framing to then jump into your stories.
Heaven, Hell, and Shunning Outsiders
Kari Hanks [01:09:02] Yeah, I want to talk about heaven and hell because my understanding is Mormonism has like different levels of. Yet for the two by twos, it's very binary. You have hell or heaven. And hell is a literally literal fiery burning, eternal torture forever. There's no redemption possible. And heaven is basically, we were taught convention is what heaven will be like. So you're sitting around worshiping at the feet of the throne of God with
John Dehlin [01:09:34] the words of the forever.
Kari Hanks [01:09:35] Lots of singing, singing praises, singing hymns with his chosen, saved people forever, for eternity.
John Dehlin [01:09:42] Okay, that's important.
Margi Dehlin [01:09:43] Was that a lure? Like, did you love convention where you were like, I would. That is what I want.
John Dehlin [01:09:49] Or is it more like I want to do convention?
Margi Dehlin [01:09:51] Or is it more like hell is just so terrible.
Kari Hanks [01:09:55] I loved convention as a kid. Cause I had good experiences there, which is not the case for everybody. As an older adult who was listening more to the messages being preached, I thought eternity might be boring if this is what it's like forever and ever. But we're taught that there's such a feeling of peace and joy that in heaven that it would. And when the alternative is hell, torture and suffering and burning.
John Dehlin [01:10:25] Convention.
Kari Hanks [01:10:26] It sounds great.
John Dehlin [01:10:27] Yeah. Interesting.
Kyle Hanks [01:10:29] Yeah. The convention is just a little taste of heaven. It's a little. This is our natural version. This is what we're doing on earth. But heaven's gonna be so much better.
Kari Hanks [01:10:35] And they don't recognize the family forever thing. At least that's not how I was taught. I was taught that in heaven you wouldn't recognize your earthly family, but everyone would be one big family of God, so it wouldn't matter to you. But as a child, that was something that scared me. I thought, if I die young and I go to heaven, I'm not going to recognize my parents there. Like that sounds scary.
Kyle Hanks [01:10:56] I just grew up Thinking it wouldn't matter because we're just all souls and we wouldn't recognize each other anyway. And we're all just there in peace. There is a verse that says something about that in heaven there's no marriage or giving in marriage, something like that. They took that to mean there's just no, we're all just there together. That's it.
Kari Hanks [01:11:12] There's two more kind of rules that we missed, which is no TV. Two by twos do not technically not supposed to have TVs. A lot of people have a TV hidden in a cupboard in their home somewhere or in a closet. But we didn't grow up with tv. So a lot of cultural references we don't understand, some of those we've tried to catch up in the last, last little while. But. And that was actually something we did before we left, we ended up getting a tv. And that's a big no, no. And then most families in the US specifically don't celebrate Christmas. So we didn't grow up having Christmas trees or decorating. My family did presents because my parents loved doing presents. And it was like something that was fun for us, but we didn't make it a religious thing.
John Dehlin [01:11:56] Huh.
Kyle Hanks [01:11:57] And nothing being written down. That's where you go around to different parts of the world. In Australia, they don't understand why we didn't celebrate Christmas.
Kari Hanks [01:12:02] You know, the workers there didn't preach that Christmas was wrong. And we had a worker here in the 70s, like my parents grew up with a Christmas tree, or my mom did at least. And then some worker came along in the 60s and 70s and started preaching that that had pagan roots. And all of a sudden Christmas trees weren't allowed anymore.
Kyle Hanks [01:12:18] Yeah, the traditions are really strange. You'll see. The TV tradition is such a funny one. The X community jokes about it a lot because it doesn't really make any sense. But what happened is television came out on the market for people to buy and were readily available to the average consumer. And a worker decided, well, if they're going to stay home and watch tv, they're not going to come to the church meetings. At least that's the lore I've heard and said, well, we shouldn't do it. God's people shouldn't do something like that. And that held. It held everywhere, pretty much everywhere in the world. People who grew up in this have iPhones, they got iPads, they got all kinds of things, but they don't have TVs or they've hidden them. They're in a closet somewhere and they pull them out in a big chair.
Kari Hanks [01:12:58] And that means also no movie theaters. If Jesus returns while you're in a movie theater, he's not gonna collect you from a movie theater or a school dance. No dancing. No dancing.
Margi Dehlin [01:13:08] So as computers have come on the scene, how do they. I mean, have they had to update kind of that where. Well, if you have a computer, you can't watch. Computers can be a lot like this on a computer.
Kari Hanks [01:13:19] Most of the workers know now that two by twos are watching shows and movies and just don't do it when the workers are around. But workers themselves would not watch shows and movies. I have seen a worker watch YouTube clips of like cute cats or something, but they're not watching shows and movies or listening to music. Whereas the general two by twos are allowed.
John Dehlin [01:13:39] Wait, you can't listen to pop music?
Kari Hanks [01:13:40] General two by twos. Most families allowed music, but workers would not listen to music. But were you allowed?
Kyle Hanks [01:13:47] Well, and there's certain parts of the globe where that's not allowed. So in Australia, they have Christmas, but they don't. They weren't allowed to listen to music to the point that they would. The workers. There was a time where car antennas were the big wire antennas, you know, and the workers would go around a convention and snap the antennas off of the cars because they're like, you shouldn't be listening to music.
Kari Hanks [01:14:07] They were damaging people's properties.
John Dehlin [01:14:08] Dang.
Kyle Hanks [01:14:09] But where we live, that wasn't a as big of a deal. My family didn't listen to a lot of music, but it wasn't a deal breaker. So there's just a lot of disjointed things. There's a lot of disjointed rules that didn't make any sense that you held to religiously because you just wanted to be as safe as possible.
John Dehlin [01:14:24] Right.
Margi Dehlin [01:14:25] And obedience is the point, right?
Kyle Hanks [01:14:27] Yeah, the obedience. Exactly. The obedience is the point that it wasn't that there. It wasn't that the rules were clearly defined, because they weren't. It's that if you were a good Christian, if you were a good. We didn't even say Christian. If you're professing to love and serve God. God and follow Jesus, if you're going to go in the Jesus way, you're going to do the simplest thing to stay as close to the center of the fold. They like to say, like a sheepfold, stay in the center. Don't go to the edge. So a very conscientious, scrupulous two by two would just stay like Well, I don't really know how we feel about that, so I feel I'm going to stay away from it.
John Dehlin [01:15:01] And baptism is a requirement to go to heaven or not, I think so.
Kyle Hanks [01:15:07] It. Yeah, it's one of those weird things. I'm not sure.
Kari Hanks [01:15:09] Confessing and you're. And you die before you get a chance to be baptized. I. You would be saved?
Kyle Hanks [01:15:15] I think so, yeah. I don't know.
Kari Hanks [01:15:16] But if you're an adult and you refuse baptism, then you're not taking steps with Jesus, so then you're not willing.
Kyle Hanks [01:15:23] Okay.
Kari Hanks [01:15:23] And then we kind of didn't. We didn't talk about membership numbers. Well, they don't keep track of membership. When we were growing up, our. From what we've learned from this book that Cherie published was like the peak two by two, when they were most populous. And they estimate that there were about 150,000 to 200,000 worldwide in the 1980s. Pre Covid, that number was down to about 75,000. Rough estimate. And it's definitely gone down since then
John Dehlin [01:15:55] because I think I chatgpt it, and I think chatgpt may have said like 800,000 to a million.
Kari Hanks [01:16:01] That's not right.
John Dehlin [01:16:03] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [01:16:03] Yeah, no, no, we're close to that.
John Dehlin [01:16:05] I don't think that you know of.
Kyle Hanks [01:16:07] That we know of. Yeah.
Margi Dehlin [01:16:08] I mean, it's the secrecy part. The secrecy part is so very like.
Kari Hanks [01:16:11] But again, if you. They do have worker lists that they release every year. So if. If you know kind of how many friends there are compared to workers, you can come up with a rough estimate. And if there were a million two by twos worldwide, there would be a lot more workers.
Margi Dehlin [01:16:26] Oh, I see.
Kyle Hanks [01:16:26] Yeah. They're very purposeful about where they send workers to an area that has a certain number of friends, is what we call them. I know we started using that term, friends, which is adherence to the two by two faith. And sometimes people have offered to go into the work. They've offered to their overseer, like, I feel called to go in. And they've said, well, wait, we don't really have a place yet. We'll put you in a place eventually. That type of thing. The ministry, I should say, is not compelled in any way. It's just volunteer. Somebody feels moved by the spirit, quote, unquote. They'll go to the head worker, the overseer, and say, I'd like to be on your staff. And then they decide. Yeah, nay.
Growing Up Inside the Church
John Dehlin [01:16:58] All right, so now that we've heard about kind of the framework of the church, I'm dying To hear. We're dying to hear about your upbringings in the church.
Kari Hanks [01:17:09] Okay, yeah, I'll start with mine. Yeah, two by twos.
John Dehlin [01:17:14] Go.
Kari Hanks [01:17:14] Back in my family, I'm fourth generation on one side and third generation on the other. Both of my grandfathers were elders, so they had meetings in their home. And then all of my growing up years, we had a Sunday morning meeting in our home as well. So being an elders kid, I mean, it was normalized for me. We weren't allowed to drink the grape juice in the fridge. I always wanted grape juice. But that was for meeting the weekend pretty much was cleaning, getting ready for Sunday morning meeting, making sure the house was ready and set up and setting up chairs and kind of getting prepared for that.
Kari Hanks [01:17:54] And I guess there was an added pressure, looking back, of making sure that you behaved as an elder's child because you don't want to do something that would put your parents meeting in jeopardy that might risk them having the meeting removed.
Kari Hanks [01:18:10] But I was the youngest of four kids of three older brothers. And we were very spread out in age. So my oldest brother is 11 years older than me and then nine years older and then four and a half years older. Then my mom had a miscarriage and then me.
Kari Hanks [01:18:25] So we were pretty spread out in that way. My grandpa's sister was a worker, so she went in the work in 1950 and was in the work until she died in. I want to say I was three. So around 1990.
Kari Hanks [01:18:42] So that was sort of this. We had this family reputation of. We kind of joke now as x2 x twos that it was like royalty. There are certain families that have this reputation of royalty.
John Dehlin [01:18:55] So just in Washington or throughout the
Kari Hanks [01:18:58] world, in Washington, it would be localized. Yeah. We didn't know that many two by twos unless we went to convention with them or traveled to other conventions. And there are some. There's enough doctrinal issues between the west and the eastern U.S. in Canada that I was taught growing up that you want to be careful not to move Colorado or East or marry someone Colorado or east of there because they believed that divorce and remarriage was okay. And on the west it was strictly forbidden. In all cases, you do not get divorce and remarriage. Remarry.
John Dehlin [01:19:35] That's wild. That regionally there's sort of judgment or differences.
Kari Hanks [01:19:42] And they wouldn't swap workers back and forth that often either between the east and the west coasts.
Kyle Hanks [01:19:48] We just didn't think about that too. That's so obvious now, that that's a theological split. But at the time we thought, well, you know, those ones over there, they're a little different than us. We'll just. We'll just keep to ourselves. And that should have bothered us more, I would think.
Margi Dehlin [01:20:01] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [01:20:01] It was just kind of one of those general warnings of like, okay, just make sure you don't date. Date. Anyone from Colorado was always like a big. Everyone was suspicious of Colorado, where we
Margi Dehlin [01:20:10] grew up, where everything goes wrong.
Kari Hanks [01:20:14] I don't know. And they're, you know, even within. So we've learned since leaving, even within the ministry, there were arguments going on with specific workers centered around Colorado and east versus the west coast. So there was a definite kind of split in. It was almost like a different faction. If you were visiting the east coast, it was okay to go to meetings there and to like go to convention there and you would be con and they would be considered two by twos in that way. But they're confused with some doctrinal issues. So that's how we looked at it.
John Dehlin [01:20:48] Okay.
Kari Hanks [01:20:50] So I actually grew up my early years next door to some other two by twos, which was unusual. They don't usually live next door to each other and they happened to be Kyle's aunt and uncle. So I was best friends with his cousins when I was young and Kyle would be over there for birthday parties and, you know, I'd see him occasionally. So the first picture we have together, I'm two and he's five and we're sitting with a bunch of kids on a couch. So that's kind of a fun. I've always known him my entire life. Wow.
Kyle Hanks [01:21:21] She was always my sister's friend.
Kari Hanks [01:21:23] Yeah, I was friends with his sister and his cousins. So he was sort of just always, always around.
John Dehlin [01:21:30] This probably goes without saying, but you probably are encouraged to only socialize with other two by twos. Is that right?
Kari Hanks [01:21:36] Yeah. Yep. I'll get into that when I get to my school year. So we lived next door to that family until I was eight. It's actually funny, for a while, for some reason, we ended up in two different fields, even though we were right next door to each other. So there was one memory I have where we have the workers at our house and they had their field workers at their house at the same time. And we had sister workers and they had brother workers and they ended up having a water balloon fight in the front yard, which was really fun. We didn't see workers play that often and have fun.
Kari Hanks [01:22:06] And then the overseer was like, how did this happen that you two live right next door to each other and you're in different fields. Who did that? And they were like you did, you assigned the fields. So after that they were put in our field and then they would just walk over to our house for Sunday morning meeting. So that was fun. And then when I was eight, we moved away from there to another part of Washington.
Kari Hanks [01:22:28] And my oldest brother also got married and moved out that year. He was 19 and he moved out of state and my home. And this is very common in the two by twos. We had a lot of corporal punishment and my brother is very tall and was kind of my protector. So him moving out made life more difficult in many ways in that way for me. I was also sexually abused by an older teen two by two when I was eight.
John Dehlin [01:22:58] Non worker, non worker, correct?
Kari Hanks [01:23:00] Yeah, yep. And I started having more mental health issues at that age. Anxiety and OCD coming up. But we did not have terminology for mental health. We just, just didn't understand what it was, what was going on. So I was just seen as a nervous little kid. I didn't even have a term for anxiety.
Kari Hanks [01:23:21] Growing up. As a two by two girl, you're taught to be mature from a very young age. Like your goal in life is to get married and have a family. So I always took that very seriously. I was one of those kids that, like Kyle was saying, preferred to stay in the middle of the fold because as the workers would preach, if you're on the outer edges of the fold, sometimes the wolves can come and grab those sheep. So I took that really seriously. And I had a lot of scrupulosity OCD from a young age.
Kari Hanks [01:23:53] And it presented in some other ways. Like when I was, I think 14, we had a fairly large earthquake, it was a 6.8. And so that brought up some new OCD fears and things like that. But yeah, mental health just was really medicine in general. Two by twos, at least in my family and a lot of other families I'm familiar with, this wasn't the case for everybody. But a lot of two by twos don't trust science.
John Dehlin [01:24:22] Yeah, like mental health is probably discouraged.
Kari Hanks [01:24:24] Like psychologists, we just weren't educated about it. We didn't have terms for it. We didn't really know what was going on. So a lot of treatments, quote unquote, looked like essential oils or foot toxin baths or ear candling or things like that. And my mom really did try to help me in the ways that she knew how, but there just wasn't a lot of knowledge or education or trust in your typical doctors. And she. I also started having chronic illness symptoms around that age and I have a genetic condition, but that's when it really started raising its head. And again, like, we went to a few doctors, nobody could really find out what was going on. So we just sort of tried to take care of it at home.
Margi Dehlin [01:25:09] I see it feels like a major theme for you growing up in many facets. Like you've mentioned earthquake, you know, discipline, the way that you were, you know, the corporal punishment aspect, suffering from abuse, it's safety, like, and trying to stay in the middle of the sheep flock idea is just danger is everywhere. How do I stay safe in this, in this life, in this world?
Kari Hanks [01:25:43] I did really feel that way. And we were taught that two by twos are where you are safe and two by two people are who you are safe around. Even though my abusers were two by two. So at the same time, I'm going to school, where I was always safe at school. And yet you're taught, like, don't get too close to these people.
Kari Hanks [01:26:04] You can. I was allowed to have friends at school, but they were not supposed to be on the same level as two by two friends. Like, there's a very clear, distinct difference. Two by two friends are your real friends. They are your. The real community that you can trust and rely on.
Kari Hanks [01:26:22] So my family and two by twos in general, I remember like when workers sent out emails or passed out meeting, they would print meeting lists of where people were to go to meeting or worker lists of where, what fields workers would be in. We would shred those. So we would get a collection of lists because my dad was an elder. So he would hand them out at meeting and then. And the rest of them he would shred. Or if we had old lists that we came across in paperwork or something, we would shred those. So there was definitely this underlying secrecy and paranoia of government that just ran through the entire two by two culture.
Kari Hanks [01:27:00] And yeah, as far as corporal punishment, there was just. We were surrounded by violence in general as two by twos. Like all of my, you know, when I would look around at certain friends that I was growing up with, there was a lot of corporal punishment. So it was very normalized. And I never really saw that as being abnormal or unusual.
Kari Hanks [01:27:24] And then there was also a lot of talk in my home about spirits, like angels and demons, being literal entities that could appear to you. A lot of two by twos had stories about hearing audible voices or having a spirit appear to them in person. And that was something that terrified me as a kid. I didn't care if it was a demon or an angel. I do not want to see some being in my room talking to me. You know, that was always a scary idea.
John Dehlin [01:27:54] And that comes from Jesus and the New Testament, right?
Kari Hanks [01:27:57] Yeah, yeah. And again, like, when I'm talking about my experience, it's what I'm familiar with. And other families may have had different experiences in that, but that was. That was definitely something like Ouija boards were seen to be something that evil spirits could communicate through that kind of thing.
John Dehlin [01:28:15] Us too.
Childhood Activities and Social Restrictions
Margi Dehlin [01:28:16] Did you have interests or hobbies?
Kari Hanks [01:28:20] One advantage of not growing up with a TV was I loved to read. I read all the time. There were certain books we wouldn't go near which would be books about religion or theology.
John Dehlin [01:28:35] So information control.
Kari Hanks [01:28:36] Information, yeah, there was information control, yes. But I loved both fiction and nonfiction. I played piano most two by two kids have some sort of instrument that they take lessons with. Piano is a big one because there's no like choir or music group that ever plays at meetings. But when I was growing up, the gospel meetings we went to, if they rented a hall with a piano in it, like a. I don't even know what hall would come with a piano.
Kyle Hanks [01:29:07] A lot of granges and stuff. A lot of the old types of halls.
Kari Hanks [01:29:11] There's like an Elks Lodge, I think we would have.
Kyle Hanks [01:29:13] Yeah, the lodges, Granges, stuff like that would have pianos in them. Sometimes schools or schools.
Kari Hanks [01:29:17] And then they would have. Yeah, and then they would have a two by two who could play piano, play along with the hymns, which my dad would often do. He was often the piano player at gospel meeting. So I took piano lessons. I took horseback riding lessons for a while.
Kari Hanks [01:29:32] I wanted to play soccer because my brothers played soccer. But soccer practice for girl teams was often Sundays, so I wasn't allowed to do that. So anything that interfered with meeting times, anything that could develop from a hobby into a passion or a love that could interfere with your relationship with God and could be an unhealthy thing in the eyes of the two by twos. So I really loved writing. I wanted to be an author when I was young.
Kari Hanks [01:30:04] But that. But being famous as a two by two is not something you would do like it. That was heavily discouraged. So I would be told, like, well, maybe you could use like a pseudonym or something. But that's not really. Like, do you see other two by twos with published books? That's not really a two by two career. So that.
John Dehlin [01:30:24] And they wouldn't say two by two so what would they say?
Kari Hanks [01:30:26] How would they say that's not some like, do you know any other professing. Published authors.
John Dehlin [01:30:30] Professing.
Kari Hanks [01:30:31] Professing.
John Dehlin [01:30:31] So inside you would refer to each other as professors?
Kyle Hanks [01:30:35] Yeah, that's. That's how.
Kari Hanks [01:30:36] Not professors just professing.
Kyle Hanks [01:30:37] Professing. Are they are professing or the friends.
Kari Hanks [01:30:40] Do you know any other of the friends who are published authors or do
Kyle Hanks [01:30:43] they go to meetings that. We use that phrase a lot.
John Dehlin [01:30:46] It's so weird.
Kyle Hanks [01:30:47] It is weird because there wasn't a strict set of words. It was just words that were notional. So are. Are they. Some of the friends, are they professing also? Another thing we would do is we would filter things through the workers judgment too. So things like, you know, would the workers approve if you did something like this?
Margi Dehlin [01:31:03] That type of thing.
Kyle Hanks [01:31:04] They sort of spoke for God too. I don't know if you ever.
Margi Dehlin [01:31:06] I can so see why. Just that that switch in terminology for you to call things actually what they are or to be healing.
John Dehlin [01:31:16] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [01:31:17] It's empowering and it gives you a sense of autonomy separate from the group.
Margi Dehlin [01:31:20] That's right.
John Dehlin [01:31:21] But it's weird because. Yeah, you're saying, you're saying two by twos now, but when you were experiencing it, you would have said.
Kari Hanks [01:31:28] Right. That wouldn't have been the exact quote,
John Dehlin [01:31:29] professing or the friends.
Kari Hanks [01:31:31] Or the friends or anyone else who goes to meetings.
Margi Dehlin [01:31:34] Right. Which is like a code term for safe. Safe information, safe people. Tribal. Acceptable.
Kari Hanks [01:31:42] Yeah, you're part of the same. You're part of the tribe. You're accepted here. Like. Yeah, that's how they know each other. The two by twos have. There's a lot of pride in being able to recognize each other, like in public or, you know, if you're picking up a worker at the airport that you've never met, they'll say, we recognize each other by the spirit. But in reality, if you're picking up a sister worker at the airport and she has her hair in a bun and she has a dress on and she looks like a pioneer and she had, you know, no makeup, no jewelry, you're recognizing them by their outward looks. Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:32:15] Okay.
Kari Hanks [01:32:16] So I don't know what year the movie ants came out, but I was at a sleepover birthday party with some school friends and they decided the next day that they all wanted to go see the movie ants in theater. And I was feeling really bothered about just kind of going along with it. I knew I wasn't supposed to go to movie theaters, but I got in the car. And we all drove there. And I saw. I think it was a pay phone outside of the movie theater. And I said to my friend's mom, I'm not really supposed to go to into movie theaters. Like, I think I should call and ask my mom's permission.
Kari Hanks [01:32:51] I'm pretty sure it'll be okay, but. Cause we're, like, with the group with a birthday party. So I called and asked permission, like, hey, all the kids are going to see ants. Which is totally innocuous. Can I go with them? Like, we're all here at the movie theater. And my mom's like, absolutely not. I'm gonna come and pick you up. So she came and picked me up from outside of the movie theater while all my friends went in to see the movie.
John Dehlin [01:33:14] Did that kind of scar you a little bit?
Kari Hanks [01:33:16] It was. It was really embarrassing. And it was one of the first times I remember really noticing, like, there are rules, even though they say there aren't rules. This was a hard line that was drawn that you are not allowed to go in a movie theater.
Kari Hanks [01:33:33] And then When I was 13, my older brothers snuck me into a movie. Like, snuck me out. They were babysitting me, and they gave me this big story to tell about. Like, tell mom. We went to an IMAX theater because IMAX theaters were okay. They were educational movies. So we had this big backstory about which IMAX movie we went to see.
Kari Hanks [01:33:53] And they took me to a movie theater, and we saw this rated R movie. And I was 13 and had not been exposed to a lot of stuff like that. And so I remember my brothers, like, covering my eyes for half the scenes.
Kari Hanks [01:34:05] Anyway, so we get home and my brothers. I don't. I think my two oldest brothers had already moved out. They dropped me off at the house, and I went in, and my mom's like, what'd you guys do today? And I was like, oh, we went to an IMAX theater. And she's like, which one did you see? And I think it was like, was it Michael Jordan?
Kyle Hanks [01:34:21] It was the Michael Jordan biography.
Kari Hanks [01:34:23] Michael Jordan biography or something.
Kyle Hanks [01:34:24] That was your cover story?
Kari Hanks [01:34:25] That was my cover story. So anyway, I told her we went to this Michael Jordan imax. And she goes, I looked it up in the paper. And they stopped showing that last week. So she caught me out on our line. We all got in big trouble for lying to her and going to a movie theater.
John Dehlin [01:34:39] Can I just note, especially for those who are brand new, that we like to evaluate. I mean, we'll leave it up to you. To decide whether two by twos qualify as a high demand religion or just a normal Christian group or as a cult. But we want to always call out the framework, the easy, easy to remember framework. The bite model. High demand religions or cults control your behavior. That's the B. So high, high control over behavior in a way that induces shame and guilt. So that's the B. The I is information control, which we've already started to highlight. They weren't allowed or encouraged to read books that weren't approved, especially about other faiths or religions. And then t, the thought control, controlling what thoughts you have through manipulation and then manipulation through emotion. So we'll get there. But I imagine, for what it's worth,
Kari Hanks [01:35:32] we've had Dr. Steve Hassan and Dr. Janja Lelich come and over Zoom in our support group.
John Dehlin [01:35:38] Oh, fun.
Kari Hanks [01:35:39] And they both consider the two by twos to be a cult. So Dr. Steve Hassan says it takes all of the bite model.
Margi Dehlin [01:35:46] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [01:35:46] Things. Yep.
Margi Dehlin [01:35:47] Yep.
John Dehlin [01:35:48] But we'll let you decide.
Kari Hanks [01:35:50] So once I started dating when I was 16, I would. The rules suddenly got much lax, more lax around movie theaters. And when I was with my date, we I was allowed to go to movie theaters. My parents just were like, didn't say anything about it. So that was a weird switch that happened.
Kari Hanks [01:36:06] I'm not exactly sure why, other than my older brothers were troublemakers in a lot of ways. So maybe by the time I was a teenager, they were like, as long as we know where you are and you're home by curfew and you're not having sex, you know, we trust you.
Kari Hanks [01:36:23] So that was. That was when I started going to movie theaters for the first time. We still have a TV or anything. So after moving in the middle of second grade, I changed schools in the middle of the school year.
Kari Hanks [01:36:35] And I started experiencing a lot of bullying, mostly, I think because of how I looked as a two by two. By the time I got to junior high, my first year of junior high, I had been begging my parents to homeschool me for a while, which was not a commonly done thing. In the two by twos. We knew a few families who homeschooled, but it wasn't like a thing the two by twos did.
Kari Hanks [01:36:58] But I was having such a bad time at school that I was begging my parents to homeschool me. I came home one day with my arm completely bloodied from being shoved into a locker door because kids were trying to get me to swear and I wouldn't swear. So after that, my mom agreed and pulled me out of public school and I homeschooled through the rest of junior high and high school.
Kari Hanks [01:37:21] Now, looking back, there are definitely experiences I feel like I missed out on, like school dances and prom and kind of the typical teenager. Like two by two teenagers aren't. They're discouraged from exploring. Exploring your sexuality. There's really no.
Kari Hanks [01:37:40] The normal teen and early adolescent years of like figuring out who you are and your identity and discovering autonomy and independence and. And all of that is very discouraged. So I do feel like I had a very restricted teen and adolescent years. I'm bisexual and I didn't realize that until I was in my 30s because that wasn't something that you're allowed to explore as a two by two.
Margi Dehlin [01:38:07] Right.
John Dehlin [01:38:08] Is masturbation denounced within the phase?
Kari Hanks [01:38:12] You know, they don't directly talk about that or sex at all really, other than just don't do it before marriage. So it wasn't ever really something that was talked about. But I felt a lot of shame and guilt around it.
Kyle Hanks [01:38:26] It's a very sex negative culture to the point that it's so taboo. You don't talk about it. There's taboos that you do talk about, like don't listen to the wrong music or read the wrong books. But sex is so far over the line that they really just don't talk about it that much.
John Dehlin [01:38:39] I'm guessing same with porn then.
Kyle Hanks [01:38:41] Yeah, okay. Definitely.
Kari Hanks [01:38:42] Yeah. And that was one thing that it took me really until adulthood when I had a daughter who turned eight, I started thinking more about my own sexual abuse at that age and realizing I didn't have language for my body parts. I didn't have language to understand. I had nightmares for decades after that happened, but I didn't understand why. And I think not having access to what was healthy and what was unhealthy at all, it just wasn't talked about at all. Really. That impacted me in that way. Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:39:18] Okay.
Kari Hanks [01:39:20] My OCD also started getting worse during my teen years. Like, I had scrupulosity to the point that if the thought of prayer popped into my head, I thought God was telling me I needed to go bow down beside my bed and pray. So I was doing that dozens of times a day. Sometimes I started feeling bothered about the work. So the way that they preach about, like when you feel moved to go in the work, first of all, being a worker is considered giving your very best. It's like the ultimate sacrifice. And when you have ocd, giving your very best is like what you expect of yourself.
Kari Hanks [01:39:56] So I Thought if going in the work is your best, then that's what God would want from me. Like, why would I give any less? So I started feeling like that must mean God wants me to be a woman worker, which was a very scary thought. I wanted to have kids and get married and have a home and a family, and workers give all of that up. It's the ultimate sacrifice. So all through my teen years, I felt very disturbed and bothered by the idea that I might, God might call me into the work. And I thought that was God calling me into the work in my late teens.
Kari Hanks [01:40:29] And I was dating all throughout my teen years too. But in my late teens, I remember a worker preaching at a convention that, that we also need homes, like we need good homes for the workers to stay in and for meetings and to raise kids who are professing.
Kari Hanks [01:40:43] And after that I was like, okay, that's what God wants me to do. So I felt more peace after that. But that was like a theme through all of my teen years that I felt very conflicted about. When I was 14, we moved from the Seattle area to the Las Vegas area.
Kari Hanks [01:41:01] So I spent all of my teen years in the Vegas area. And there were definitely less two by twos there. So it was pretty lonely compared to what I had come from, where there was this big culture and lots of peers my age.
Kari Hanks [01:41:14] I didn't have a lack of friends because there were so many two by two kids that I grew up around in the Seattle area. But when we moved to the Vegas area, there were like a few kids my age, but not, not very many.
Teen Years, Isolation, and Chronic Illness
Kari Hanks [01:41:27] So that was kind of a lonely going through my teen years there. But I got used to being by myself. My chronic illness was definitely a theme through my teen years too. I didn't feel good a lot, and again, like, we just kind of. It was just something you lived with.
Kari Hanks [01:41:45] And then Kyle and I became good friends when I was probably 19. It was about for a full year before we started dating that we really went from kind of like, oh, this is my friend's older brother, to we were becoming good friends, even though I had a boyfriend at that point.
John Dehlin [01:42:09] I read that education, like higher education, college is discouraged. Is it discouraged generally or just for women?
Kari Hanks [01:42:17] Or neither in my family. It definitely wasn't seen as a liberal thing that could pull you away from God. So higher education was discouraged across the board in my family, for all of us, but especially for women, because men did need a job that could support a family, whereas women just needed to get married and have kids. And be supported. So that was what I was taught about my role as a woman.
John Dehlin [01:42:44] And that's information control and that's thought control and that's behavioral control. Those are big ones, I think, just to call it out.
Kari Hanks [01:42:53] Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I was a good two by two. So that's what I did. Yeah, I met Kyle and we were friends and then we dated long distance for. Because he was in Seattle still. I was in the Las Vegas area.
Kari Hanks [01:43:08] So we dated long distance the entire time. We were dating for six months before we got engaged. And then we were engaged for another nine months Just so no one would think it was a shotgun wedding or something. Planning the wedding, you know.
Kari Hanks [01:43:23] And then we got married and moved back to. I moved straight out of my parents house in with Kyle, which for me, like, adjusting to marriage was a pretty easy transition. But adjusting back to being in Seattle was really difficult for me. I'm not sure if there were certain triggers there. I know the weather was really difficult on my mental health. I remember having nightmares where I would wake myself up screaming, which I had never done in my life before. So that was. It was difficult adjusting back to being there. And we were there for three years and then we moved to Arizona. We wanted to move back to the sun for weather reasons and also because my parents were still in the Las Vegas area.
Kari Hanks [01:44:05] So we wanted to be closer to them. And Kyle had job opportunities in Arizona. And Arizona has a lot of two by twos. And there were a lot of families our age with kids, you know, starting their families. Like we had a. When we moved to Arizona, we had held wish. Our daughter, eight months old.
Kyle Hanks [01:44:25] Yeah. Something like under a year.
Kari Hanks [01:44:28] Yeah. I should mention too, in the two by twos in. In the Seattle area, when our oldest daughter was born, there were a lot of two by two families utilizing midwives and home births. So that's what we did as well. She was born actually in a freestanding birth center.
Kari Hanks [01:44:44] And that was a bit of a traumatic process. She was born, her cord got pinched on the way out of the birth canal. So she was born not breathing, completely floppy, white, unresponsive. And when you've just given birth, your body releases this flood of love hormones, oxytocin, that signals your uterus to contract to stop bleeding. And that process was blocked for me because I was worried about my daughter not breathing. She had to be manually bagged.
Kari Hanks [01:45:16] And so then I started hemorrhaging, which is also a complication of one of my chronic illnesses that I didn't know I had at that time. So it was a bit of a scary process, but all ended up being well. And we were sent home, like, six hours after she was born from that birthing center.
Kari Hanks [01:45:39] Anyway, so we moved to Arizona when she was 8 months old and decided to have kid number two almost right away. I think she was 9 or 10 months old when we got pregnant again.
John Dehlin [01:45:53] Can I ask a couple of quick questions? Okay. So I want to. So Brooklyn made an interesting observation that the workers are a little bit like the Sea Org in Scientology, where if you're kind of really dedicated to the church, family is discouraged. And that is a really extreme thing now that I stopped to think about it, that if you want to really work for the church and give your life to the church, you have to forsake ever getting married or having kids.
Kari Hanks [01:46:26] Yeah, self sacrifice.
John Dehlin [01:46:27] Everybody's pretty extreme. And are the overseers also celibate and no family? So they're former workers.
Kari Hanks [01:46:34] They follow all the rules of the workers, plus they're in a leadership position.
Kyle Hanks [01:46:38] They are workers. They're not former workers. They are workers. They have fields they go to and everything else. They travel around in pairs as well. They just have a little extra responsibility.
John Dehlin [01:46:44] Oh, they're also in pairs.
Kari Hanks [01:46:45] Yes.
Kyle Hanks [01:46:45] But there is a. There's no pressure for anybody to go in the work, but it is. It is seen as the ultimate sacrifice, which. It is a big sacrifice. So you do feel like. I think all of. Very common among the X community is saying that they went through a period where they felt called to the ministry because that would be the best sacrifice. That would be me giving my best. And we have him singing about giving our best to God.
Kari Hanks [01:47:06] So to be clear, they're not pairing overseers together either. So you'll have a pair of workers where one of them is the overseer.
John Dehlin [01:47:13] I was gonna ask that, and then I'm, you know. And so that's reminding me of the Catholic Church and priests and nuns, basically. And then I'm just dying to know whether, you know, gay and lesbians who are born and raised two by twos end up seeking out. You're nodding your head.
Kyle Hanks [01:47:32] I think that's probably true. I think a lot of.
John Dehlin [01:47:36] How do you know? It's very common.
Kari Hanks [01:47:37] It's very common because we see it in the ex worker community that there are a lot of ex workers in the LGBTQ community who are gay or lesbian. Yes.
Kyle Hanks [01:47:45] Yeah. We've always, you know, you have suspicions or whatever when you're young and you're watching the workers or whatever. But. But no One would ever say, this is why I did it, you know. But yeah, when workers leave and talk more openly about it, that is definitely a thing. It's definitely a thing of like, well, I don't feel called to have a family because that's not what I'm attracted to. So I'm going to go try this instead. So it's not a. I wouldn't say it's a common story, but it happens for sure.
John Dehlin [01:48:08] And then there would have to be pairs of workers who end up having liaisons or trists or whatever.
Kyle Hanks [01:48:14] So we hear.
John Dehlin [01:48:15] Yeah. From ex workers.
Kyle Hanks [01:48:19] Yeah.
John Dehlin [01:48:19] Okay. So that's interesting. The other thing I just wanted to ask about was kind of the epistemology. Like, you know, we haven't talked a lot about the E and the bite model, emotional manipulation. And I'm wondering how you're taught a testimony. I don't know if you'd call it a testimony. How you're taught to know your church is true, how you're taught to gain a witness and how testimonies or witnesses or whatever you call them are sort of nurtured and encouraged for children and youth and adults. Just how are emotions used to strengthen commitment to the church? And I know that obviously fear of a burning hell forever. You've already mentioned that. That definitely sounds like a big part of the E. Is that the big one?
Emotional Suppression and Existential Impact on Children
Kari Hanks [01:49:11] So there's, there's a lot of emotional emotion control. Emotions in the two by twos in general are really encouraged to be repressed. So you don't show a lot of fear or anger or sorrow. But you, you also don't show a lot of joy or excitement when you're in meeting. You're supposed to be sober but peaceful. So like as a girl I often got the comment you should smile more or also would get the comment you're smiling too much at meeting. You just have to have the exact right. Which ends up just being kind of a flatline, no emotion.
Margi Dehlin [01:49:52] Wow.
Kari Hanks [01:49:52] I professed when I was 10. And that's a very emotional event for the two by twos. One of the only few emotional events for the two by twos and that I didn't even realize I was wanting to profess. But my brother's girlfriend, who later she's now my sister in law, they got married. She was a convert to the church. And so they actually what we call, tested the meeting. Which means they don't do this at the end of every gospel meeting or convention meeting, but they'll have meetings where they test the meeting to see if anyone wants to profess their commitment to God. And they, and they knew that she wanted to profess, so they tested the meaning for her.
Kari Hanks [01:50:30] And she. And the way you do that is you're seated during the hymn, but if you want to profess, you stand up. So she stood up. And I found myself hopping up also. And immediately there's this flood of emotions. A lot of it is like I have 200 people looking at me and I'm 10 and this is really scary. So I in a lot of it also is like that, that love bombing, that being fully embraced into this tribe or into this fold. And so I was sobbing through the rest of the hymn while I'm standing up there and my family's crying. And a lot of two by twos who know you well are crying. So that's a very emotional event in the two by twos. But emotion in general is just not seen as serious or sober.
Kyle Hanks [01:51:14] Well, it's. You should have faith, you shouldn't be fearful, you should have faith, you shouldn't be too angry or too anything. You should just have faith that God will take care of it.
Kari Hanks [01:51:23] But even expressing joy is seen as embarrassing or shameful in a way. Like human emotions. We're not human in the sense that we're just passing through this life. We're just passing through this world. The purpose is the next life. So we're strangers in this world. We don't act like other humans do. So and that includes the full range of human emotion. Even funerals, two by two funerals are big thing. Like you have potlucks and you have big get togethers for funerals and there are a lot of elderly members who are always dying. So like funerals run all throughout my childhood. It seemed like we were always at someone's funeral.
Kari Hanks [01:52:01] And they don't talk about the person who died very much. They talk about how Jesus used this person's life to be a light or to be an example. And so there's, there's even. I have some funeral notes from when my great aunt who was a worker died of cancer.
Kari Hanks [01:52:17] And the worker who was preaching at her funeral was talking about how, you know, I'm looking out at the audience here and I don't see a lot of sorrow. There's a lot of dry eyes. But that's because she used her life to point to Jesus. So we have joy about that. So it was almost like shutting down any sorrow that the family might have been feeling in that moment. Because how could you be sitting in the audience as A family of her after the worker said that if he's saying it's a good thing, that there's a lot of dry eyes, then you don't want to be the one who starts crying.
Kyle Hanks [01:52:51] Yeah, you don't grieve because you're happy. You don't grieve that someone's gone. You're happy that they've moved on from grief.
Kari Hanks [01:52:57] Grief is shut down very quickly.
Margi Dehlin [01:52:58] That's right. And in Mormonism too, at our, you know, our church funerals, I think it can be viewed as a lack of
John Dehlin [01:53:07] faith, like to grieve, to be sad.
Kari Hanks [01:53:09] Because it would be like if you
Margi Dehlin [01:53:10] knew the plan and if you know how it all works, you or your
Kari Hanks [01:53:14] loved one who died is in heaven now. Like when we did move to Vegas, I made friends with a boy who. We were both. We were two days apart in age, actually, 15, 16. And we were friends all through our teen years after Kyle and I got married and he passed away in a motorcycle accident when we were 23.
Kari Hanks [01:53:33] And even that kind of story was like, oh, he was on his way home from gospel meeting. It was Super Bowl Sunday. So he had chosen to go to gospel meeting instead of watching the football game, even though he really liked football. It was this event that became glorified and he was almost like martyred for the two by two cause. And so showing grief in that way, it was just. Yeah, it was shut down pretty quickly because he's in heaven now. Like God, God in his mercy took him young and took him early because maybe he knew some struggles that he had ahead of him or whatever reason might be given.
John Dehlin [01:54:09] So that sort of theological speculation that always accrues to the benefit of the organization sounds very familiar. And I'll just say you're reminding me that emotional manipulation isn't just using high emotion to bond people to the church. It's getting people to suppress and mute their emotions so they're less in touch with their intrinsic self and who they are, and instead assume the organization, or as Stephen Hasson would say, the cult Persona or the cult personality. And that's where this idea from Severance of the Indian Audi comes in. Because there's whatever your intrinsic feelings and identity and instincts might be, in your case, bisexual or other things, but then there's suppress all that. And what does the organization want me to be feeling exactly? I'm only gonna feel. I'm gonna kill all feelings that the organization doesn't approve of. And that qualifies as emotional manipulation.
Kari Hanks [01:55:11] That's the E. Yeah, absolutely.
Kyle Hanks [01:55:13] Yeah, because if you have those wrong emotions, you're actually wrong with God. The creator of the universe is upset with how you feel about it. That's how we internalize it. So it's spoken by the workers, but they kind of speak for God. Cause they, they sacrifice a lot and God's supposed to speak through them. So if we're having the wrong emotion, there's something deeply wrong with us, with our spirit, with something we can barely control. That's a lot of manipulating a human being too, to tell them that feeling you're feeling, that's natural the way you're created. God doesn't really like it. You're going to have to fix that or God can't accept you. And it's just that all the time.
Margi Dehlin [01:55:46] And I think what that does, particularly as a child growing up, is it creates almost an existential crisis in a child because it teaches you that what you're feeling can't be trusted. Like if you're feeling sad and the adult in front of you is saying, no, no, no, no, no, you shouldn't be feeling sad. It's not sad. This isn't sad. I don't know why you're feeling that. You should be feeling this thing that over time it teaches you that your experience is not to be trusted, that your world and experience of it is not real.
Kari Hanks [01:56:20] Yeah. And what that leads to is a lot of like depending on external validation. When you don't trust yourself, everything has to be verified by people outside of you. It's interesting because even though the workers didn't have careers, never worked to earn money once they were in the work, never got married, never had children, people looked to them for external validation in all of those areas of their life. If you needed marital advice or you had a kid who was misbehaving, you could have the workers come over and sit down, have. And have a conversation with them about it.
John Dehlin [01:56:55] Unmarried child giving you advice about marriage.
Kari Hanks [01:56:58] They would give you advice. There were a lot of stories we've heard in our ex community of women who were being abused by their husbands, who would go to the workers for advice. And the workers would say, just stick it out, pray he'll get better, God will intervene. You know, encouraging people to stay in abusive marriages. They didn't know what they were talking about.
John Dehlin [01:57:17] They probably didn't have any training in mental health counseling.
Kari Hanks [01:57:20] Right. And I will say, to be fair to the workers, if you're going to call the two by twos a cult, which a lot of people do, fair. The worker the ministry is a cult within a cult because they literally give up their very identity and become a worker. That becomes their new identity. So when we talk about self sacrifice, that's a real thing. Like workers do self sacrifice everything for what they believe in. And a lot of them are misled to believe that it will be this experience where they are uber blessed and they have, you know, less conf. You know, temptations or. And in reality, they're still human, but they're expected to maintain this, this extra special level of behavior. And if. And if two by twos are repressing emotions, it's hardcore in, in the work.
John Dehlin [01:58:10] Yeah, they're victims too. Is that kind of what you're saying?
Kari Hanks [01:58:14] They are victims also, for sure.
John Dehlin [01:58:16] Have ex workers come out and told their stories.
Kyle Hanks [01:58:19] Yeah, okay. Yeah, we get a lot of those too, because just as they. Just as we go to them or went to them for advice on things that they didn't have any respect, any reasonable reason to give us advice, they also believed they were supposed to give it. They also believed that they had this calling, that that was their job. Their job was to shepherd the flock. And so they didn't know whether they were giving good advice or not, but it was coming from them. They sacrificed their whole life to go into the ministry, God speaking through them. They're going to believe whatever they say, too.
John Dehlin [01:58:52] I mean, for me, what that reminds me of is when I was asked to give blessings of healing or even father's blessings. I'm 16 or 18 or 21 and somebody's sick and they're like, elder Dylan, will you give me a blessing? And I'm supposed to figure out what. Whether God's going to heal them or not, you know, and if he's going to heal him, you know, whatever. And any words of counsel or if a kid or a spouse wants a father's blessing, I'm supposed to be channeling God's will for my wife, for my kids. And so you're just like, okay, well, it's what we're supposed to do, so we'll just do it.
Ministers in the Home and Family Dynamics
Kyle Hanks [01:59:29] You know, I will say that one sort of conflating factor to all that too, for our group is that the minister stayed in our homes, which means they needed homes to stay in. So if you have a husband and wife that aren't getting along and maybe one's even abusing another one, oh, man, what's the worker gonna say Now? I think they really do believe they're giving good advice, of course, but there's gonna be A little bit of a bias of how do we keep this open home? How do we keep. If we split this couple up, if we tell the couple this isn't good for you or whatever. I mean, they shouldn't be giving any advice, but if they did, if they said you should stay apart for your safety or something like that, they might lose a home that they could visit and stay in for a few nights when they're in the area.
John Dehlin [02:00:05] Did you call it open home?
Kyle Hanks [02:00:07] I'm sorry. Yeah, open home, which just means a home that the people in it are professing and they're open to the ministry.
John Dehlin [02:00:12] Got it.
Kyle Hanks [02:00:12] So we've actually noticed this little thing too.
Kari Hanks [02:00:14] Open home often also usually means a home with a meeting in it.
Kyle Hanks [02:00:19] Okay. It could be that's how we used it. Yeah, I didn't. I don't think I used it that way, but I. Yeah, it could be.
John Dehlin [02:00:23] Wait, there's differences between.
Kyle Hanks [02:00:24] Well, not everybody has a meeting. Yeah, No, I, I think that. Yeah, it's. It's just a home. Yeah. The homes that the, the ministry often talks and I, no joke, I just figured this out within the last month. Ministers often talk about the congregation as homes. They say we, you know, they look for open homes, they look for faithful homes. They don't often talk about faithful families, stuff like that, because in their minds, the homes are there to receive them, to receive their ministry. They don't talk of it in terms of families. So when someone comes with a family problem, they see this as a home problem. I think that's my own interpretation.
Margi Dehlin [02:00:59] Interesting.
Kyle Hanks [02:00:59] That just occurred to me within the last month, I was kind of thinking, reading over some old sermons and stuff and thinking, oh, that the language is interesting here. They're actually perpetuating.
Kari Hanks [02:01:06] The terminology is very insidious. Like if you have a professing spouse and an unprofessing spouse, as they would call it, you have a broken home or a divided home. Like the terminology in and of itself implies that it's problematic or it can't exist the way it is long term.
Kyle Hanks [02:01:25] Yeah. There's no healthy reason for a couple to split up. In their minds. It's. If you're following God, if you're doing what they. What God says through Jesus and actually now through the workers, if you do all that stuff, you're going to be. It's all going to work out for you. So when it doesn't work out for you, it is your fault. And I think that plays into both of our deconstructions a little later.
Kari Hanks [02:01:44] Anyway, as far as emotion control, also being raised in a family that consisted mostly of men and the two by twos being very patriarchal, there was. Emotions were repressed in that sense for me as well and I think for my mom also, not to speak for her, but. But in my family, emotions were seen as a very feminine equals weakness kind of thing. Like the girls are showing emotion. It was either something that was kind of. They would chuckle at it or it was seen as kind of silly girl emotions. So I think that was probably something that was common in a lot of two by two families. But it definitely was there in my home and especially having like three older brothers.
Margi Dehlin [02:02:27] But.
Kari Hanks [02:02:28] So where was I in my story? I was on kid number two.
John Dehlin [02:02:32] Yeah, thanks for that. That really helps expand our understanding.
Kari Hanks [02:02:37] Yeah, it's really interesting to hear the questions that you ask and just it's always good feedback for us on like what's. How other people view us has always been an interesting part of our deconstruction.
John Dehlin [02:02:48] But women getting married young with no education and having lots of kids or not lots of kids, family size was
Kari Hanks [02:02:55] very personal, I would say. Yeah, okay.
John Dehlin [02:02:58] Yeah, okay. So is birth control discouraged?
Kari Hanks [02:03:02] No, it wasn't for my family.
Kyle Hanks [02:03:05] That's a good question. I'm not sure.
Kari Hanks [02:03:07] I think I knew of one or two families who didn't believe in birth control and it was really obvious because they had a lot of kids.
Kyle Hanks [02:03:13] Yeah, it was.
Kari Hanks [02:03:13] I didn't know anyone in our generation, I don't think who.
Kyle Hanks [02:03:17] We just didn't talk about it as usual. We just didn't talk about important things.
Kari Hanks [02:03:21] But again, back to the science. There was a lot of rumors around medical birth control, like the pill or something causing health issues or like, oh yeah, I heard of this person who went on the pill and then they were paralyzed and they couldn't walk after that. There's a lot of a culture of fear around anything medical, at least in my family and the surrounding families that I was familiar with.
Kyle Hanks [02:03:45] So yeah, a lot of guidance comes from. Here's a story I heard somewhere, you know, without really running that story to ground to see if it's a real story or even happened.
Kari Hanks [02:03:52] It's just a lot of lore.
Kyle Hanks [02:03:53] Yeah, a lot of lore.
Kari Hanks [02:03:55] So at my second, right before I was due with our son, my mom was diagnosed with stage two ovarian cancer. She'd been having health issues for a while, like back pain, just kind of non specific symptoms and. And yeah, she had like a five pound tumor I think that they took out.
Kari Hanks [02:04:18] So she. I got this information the day of my 36 week appointment, which that day is kind of a blur to me. I think I was dissociating a lot. And she ended up after her surgery being in the ICU with complications for a while. So she was supposed to be at my son's birth. It was a home birth, but she wasn't able to be there for quite a while after. I think we took my son to visit her when he was two weeks old or something like that. And by then she had started chemo and had lost her hair. And it was really shocking. I ended up with Bell's palsy towards the end of my pregnancy, probably from underlying health issues and also just the stress of what was going on.
Margi Dehlin [02:05:03] I can imagine.
Kari Hanks [02:05:04] I remember my son's birth very clearly and then honestly, his first year of life. I have very little memory. Kyle's often reminding me, like, remember how he used to do this? Or he would start walking this way. And sometimes I remember and sometimes I don't when he mentions it. But I had so much postpartum anxiety, which again, I didn't have language for.
Margi Dehlin [02:05:28] Right.
Kari Hanks [02:05:29] I think I even was dipping into postpartum paranoia a couple of times. I remember this one day I had had not been getting very much sleep. He did. He might as a newborn. He was a rough sleeper. And I remember hearing like helicopters passing over our house and thinking, they're after me and my baby. And I knew that that was a weird thought to the point that I didn't tell anyone because I knew it sounded crazy, but I really believed it.
Kari Hanks [02:05:59] And so again, I had these mental health issues coming up that just were not being taken care of. We had no Support from the 2 by 2 community during this time. I always thought they would step up and like support you through things like that. But through my mom's cancer, my postpartum anxiety, my own health issues that were really starting to rear their head. I had two babies who were a year and a half apart and I just felt totally adrift, like we had no support.
Margi Dehlin [02:06:29] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:06:30] Mike and Abby, who are really good friends who run our support group with us. There's four of us who run this, who started and run the support group.
John Dehlin [02:06:39] Facebook group.
Kari Hanks [02:06:40] The Facebook group.
John Dehlin [02:06:41] Do you say what it's called?
Kari Hanks [02:06:42] The group X2. X2 support group.
John Dehlin [02:06:44] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [02:06:45] EX2 X2 support group.
Kari Hanks [02:06:47] Mike and Abby. They had lived near us when our daughter was young and they had a kid a month apart from our oldest. And then when we moved to Arizona, they moved shortly after and they were there for A year and they lived near us. And our second two kids were two months apart. So she and her babies were over at my house a lot while the guys were working. And that kept me sane.
Kari Hanks [02:07:09] And after that they moved away. But we're still really good friends and they visit us every Thanksgiving, every year. So that was a really difficult time. And definitely some big cracks in my. The things I was putting on my shelf. And one of them was just not feeling very supportive. Supported by the community, by the two by two community. In fact, we had neighbors during that time who were organizing like meal trains and coming together to support us, I think. Didn't we move right after Finn was born?
Kyle Hanks [02:07:41] Yeah, we did. I don't remember how long.
Kari Hanks [02:07:43] Very shortly after he was born. My next really clear memory is being at his first birthday. I felt like I woke up out of a dream, like, and I was like, oh, I'm at his birthday party. So that was a really difficult year where. Yeah, again, the two by two system that should have embraced and supported us just felt non existent. So that was a big crack. In retrospect, I don't think I looked at it as like a crack in my faith at the time, but looking back, that was a big thing.
Kyle Hanks [02:08:14] Yeah, it's a thing on the shelf. We love the shelf breaking analogy. We've co opted it from the Exmo community because it's so handy because it makes a lot of sense. It's looking back, there's a lot of stuff you'd put up there but didn't think about it at the time.
Kari Hanks [02:08:27] You know, where did you first. Was it. Did you hear that?
Kyle Hanks [02:08:29] I heard it on Mormons podcast. Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:08:31] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:08:32] Fun.
Kyle Hanks [02:08:33] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:08:34] We love to help in any way we can.
Kari Hanks [02:08:37] Thanks for any languages.
Lacking Language for Feelings and Experiences
Margi Dehlin [02:08:38] I was gonna say when you're talking about language and emotions and how not being given words to attach to whatever it is you're experiencing, it really does, you know, I don't know, make you reflect on the power of language that you can literally breathe experiences into existence. And also by not having language, you can. You can take them out of existence for people too, at least at the time that they're experiencing.
Kari Hanks [02:09:10] And there was so much I didn't have language for. My. My earliest memories of crushes were on girls, but I didn't have language for bisexual. I knew I liked men too. Like I was into my husband, but I didn't have language for that. You could like more than one gender. I didn't have language for my mental health conditions that were going on at the time. I didn't have language for questioning two by two beliefs. I didn't have language for my health problems that were going on or even the intrusive thoughts that I was having after the birth of my son in particular, that got really bad.
Kari Hanks [02:09:45] All of that was scarier because I didn't have language. And so when you can't define something, it's scarier. And also you're cut off from any support. Once I learned what intrusive thoughts were and what OCD was, I was able to find support. I was able to find other people out there who had experienced it. I was able to look up support groups on social media. I could talk about my experience and find other people who related. When you don't have language for that, which is something that is withheld from the X2 X2 community before our support group. It's so much more complicated.
Margi Dehlin [02:10:18] Yeah, you're an island.
John Dehlin [02:10:20] Yeah. And just not having access to TV growing up. Limits or Internet. I'm assuming you weren't on the Internet a lot or certain books.
Kari Hanks [02:10:31] Yeah, we did get Internet on our computer when it became a thing and we had social media, we would talk to people on.
Kyle Hanks [02:10:38] But there is a general suspicion of worldly knowledge, information.
Margi Dehlin [02:10:42] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:10:42] Like even science.
Margi Dehlin [02:10:43] If science is suspect, that leaves you in a very, like, vulnerable place.
Kari Hanks [02:10:48] Even now there are workers who preach stay off the Internet. Maybe especially now because of us.
Kyle Hanks [02:10:52] But yeah, we. I think we all have different experiences because my family wasn't quite as much that way. But. But there is a little bit of like, the best answers start here. If you have to move out, you can. But the best answers are in meetings. So you just do that.
Margi Dehlin [02:11:06] Okay.
Kari Hanks [02:11:07] So we had our third kid right before our oldest turned four. So we had three kids, three and under.
John Dehlin [02:11:15] Oh, wow.
Kari Hanks [02:11:17] Yeah. Very close in age. Which we wanted because we are so spread out from our own siblings. We were hoping by having kids closer in age that they would feel closer to their siblings and be friends. And I homeschooled them up until very recently.
Kari Hanks [02:11:34] So that was something that we planned. We wanted our kids close in age, but also easier said than done when you're having kids close in age and your body is struggling with unidentified health issues and you're very entrenched in the natural community. And so breastfeeding is an expectation.
Kari Hanks [02:11:54] I breastfed or was pregnant or giving birth solid for six years. I breastfed my oldest daughter until I was five months pregnant with my second. And then. Yeah, it just continued on from there. So I was taking a lot out of my body. And that also made it a little bit more difficult to realize that some of what I was struggling with was chronic illness. Because when I'd go to the doctors, they would say, well, you had your baby so close in age and you've been taking a lot of resources from your body, which is true. But I would see other mothers doing that, and they were bouncing back quicker and they were having energy to go on hikes, which I wasn't able to do.
Kari Hanks [02:12:28] So I was just noticing, especially the older. As my kids got older and older, that I was not recovering, My body wasn't recovering from. From having these kids. And. And also we were starting to struggle more. So we were starting to struggle more with getting to meetings physically because of my health and my anxiety. We would put in this so much effort to get ready for meeting with three little kids who didn't want to go because they have to sit there quietly for an hour.
Kari Hanks [02:12:57] We let our kids draw quietly or color quietly. Some families did that, some didn't, but they have to sit there on their own chair quietly for the whole hour of meeting. Our kids hated that. And as our daughter got older, she's a very skeptical kid, and she was asking questions like, mom, why do women have to look this way and why do we have to act this way? And if there's a loving God, why this? You know? And I didn't have answers for a lot of her questions. I was like, I don't know. That's just how we've always done it. That's how we've always looked.
Kari Hanks [02:13:29] Which she wasn't satisfied with that. So more cracks on the shelf. And my chronic illness with us not physically getting to meetings, which physically being in meeting where you can hear and feel the spirit of God is like a big thing for the two by two. So in us not being physically at meeting as often, we started just not being invited to, you know, family events as often or get togethers or potlucks as often. And I definitely noticed some ableism coming up in the two by twos, where they have this idea that if you, even if you have physical struggles, it's just a greater sacrifice and God will reward that in turn.
Kari Hanks [02:14:15] But when I did make it to the meetings, I didn't feel I wasn't feeling the blessing that I was told I would feel. It just felt like a big exhausting effort. We would often get all the kids ready for meeting, get in the car, get halfway to meeting. I would have some sort of panic attack, which in retrospect, threw me into some sort of medical episode. I remember like losing my vision, losing my hearing, basically blacking out. And we'd have to turn around and go home.
Kari Hanks [02:14:44] And those were never rewarded because we weren't in meeting. Even though we put in all of the effort to get there, nobody was recognizing it or seeing it again with the external validation. So it just felt like more and more difficulties and less and less of, of this blessing that we were told we would have with our sacrifice. And on top of that, as a mother who was putting everything into her children, which you're supposed to do, and I don't regret having kids, but it was my entire identity as a two by two mother. That is where your value is. And I remember having conversations with my mom, like, I just feel useless to God.
Kari Hanks [02:15:25] Like I don't feel valuable. I. I don't. I don't feel like I have my own identity. And the response was just keep going and eventually you'll feel the blessing. And yeah, it's hard to have little kids and, you know, so there's a lot of that going on. And yeah, I guess that brings us to the end of 2019.
Health Struggles and a Path to Questioning
Kari Hanks [02:15:43] I got a diagnosis finally of POTS. I was sent to a cardiologist who did what's called a tilt table test in hospital. And I got my diagnosis, which was incredibly validating. It was actually a really significant day for me almost. I would say it was a good day for me because I had answers.
Kari Hanks [02:16:06] The year before, our whole family had had like a stomach bug of some sort that was over within 24 hours. But instead of me getting over it with the rest of the family, I ended up bed bound for two months.
Kari Hanks [02:16:19] And I couldn't take care of my kids. I couldn't take care of my body. I was crawling to the bathroom. My blood pressure was super low. My mom had to come from the Vegas area because Kyle ran out of sick leave at work.
Kari Hanks [02:16:32] So she was sitting by my bed, like, taking care of me and Kyle and my mom would take me to the hospital and they would give me IV fluids and they'd be like, there's nothing wrong. You're just dehydrated. Your labs look great. I remember one doctor was like, your labs are so perfect. We could put them on our website as an example of what the ideal lab work looks like. And I'm like, but I'm dying. Like, I'm sick. I was losing weight. I was an unhealthy weight. I couldn't stand up to shower or take myself to the bathroom. Like, how can this be ideal health.
Kari Hanks [02:17:04] That's, that's not. So being diagnosed and having an answer and POTS doesn't usually show up in lab work. So it makes sense that they, you know, we're just screening for are you dying? And I wasn't. I thought I was dying. I was writing goodbye letters to my kids. It was a really scary, difficult time to be that sick and to have everyone just like. I don't know. You seem fine.
Margi Dehlin [02:17:26] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:17:28] You've probably heard the term the body keeps the score that sometimes we develop autoimmune or other types of. Because we're just constantly enduring stress or dissonance. And this is a theory of mine. It's probably, there's probably some science behind it, but I'm not speaking from a science informed perspective, just life experience. That too much untreated stress, too much cognitive dissonance for too long can do bad things to your mental health and your physical health. Do you speculate that there was some of that going on for you or not?
Kari Hanks [02:17:58] I definitely have speculated that as a child being in a state of constant fight or flight, especially with the corporal punishment that was in our household and how it could come out of nowhere very quickly I learned to be very hyper vigilant. And it hasn't. It's not lost on me that my chronic illness has to do with the autonomic nervous system, which is your fight or flight system. I do have an underlying genetic condition, so we also have a child with these conditions too. So there is a familial aspect to it.
Kari Hanks [02:18:29] But it was triggered during a time in my life where I was undergoing the abuse and a lot of other significant stressors. When I was 8, that was like when my symptoms became very prominent. And definitely stress even now can set me back sometimes permanently. And by stress I mean a virus or a literal like emotional stressor or I mean, name it.
Kari Hanks [02:18:58] If it can cause a flare in my health symptoms, it might be a permanent setback. So yeah, I think there is something to that theory.
Margi Dehlin [02:19:06] But and to add onto that with genetics now in science, what's the name?
John Dehlin [02:19:11] Epigenetics.
Margi Dehlin [02:19:11] Epigenetics. So we know with genes even genes can express are more apt to express during times of tumult or when there's a high stress kind of part. So.
Kari Hanks [02:19:22] Exactly.
Margi Dehlin [02:19:23] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:19:25] And during this time in my life where I felt very unsupported by community and my mom, who had been a big emotional support for me throughout my life, was not available because she was dealing with her own health issues. I don't Think coincidental that my health got a lot worse during that time.
Margi Dehlin [02:19:41] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:19:42] I'll just add one thing we learned from our excommunication, or mine, I should say, is just this idea of thin community. You think that Mormonism shines by its intense, high connected, high committed community, but then you realize that's only when everybody is serving the community and giving to the community and strengthening the community. But the community is a centimeter thick. If in any way you're falling short of what you know, what reinforces and builds up the community, well.
Kari Hanks [02:20:16] And just like how I, as a two by two was scared to have friends as a teenager who wore makeup up because they're toying on that they're on the edge of what is safe. Right. That being in the middle of the fold is where your safety is or where my safety was. Yeah, it's that same idea of, like, when you start. When you. At any age, if you start questioning or you start doing things a little bit differently or you're a little more verbal about your politics and your politics aren't as conservative anymore as they used to be, the rest of the tribe is going to back off a little because all of a sudden you're not that safe person.
Margi Dehlin [02:20:52] You're a danger.
Kari Hanks [02:20:53] You might even put ideas in their head or lead them astray or. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, end of 2019, I got diagnosed and then we headed into Covid era. And that was complicated for my health because I was working with multiple specialists and all of a sudden we're trying to figure out how to continue doing my testing that I needed done, but also switching everything to telehealth. And meetings were canceled, as was church in most of the country. And with that, we had physical space and distance from meetings. And that's when my shelf broke.
John Dehlin [02:21:35] Meaning you're sitting there not going to meetings, and then what thoughts come into your mind?
Kari Hanks [02:21:42] There was a lot of political unrest in the country. So I started really examining not just like what beliefs were handed me in a box with a pretty pink bow tied on it, but what do I believe? What are my values at the core? And I realized I was changing my. My mind, that what I valued, what aligned with my values, not two by two values. I was having a political deconstruction of examining ableism because of my chronic health, but also along with that, racism, LGBTQ ideas. I had always been kind of of the mind of like, I don't see harm with love as love.
Kari Hanks [02:22:19] But we looked at the LGBTQ community as basically having a struggle akin to alcoholism. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Right. It's. We feel bad for them because of their inclinations or whatever two by twos would call it.
Kari Hanks [02:22:34] But as long as they don't act on it, then we can love the person that had always not really sat right with me and everything went under the microscope. I had time and distance away from. You could call it the brainwashing of being in meetings and starting to think for myself. And I read 70 books that year. I started reading things I had never let myself read before about all of those topics, as well as science. Like, my kids were getting to the age with homeschooling, where we had trended more and more secular with them in their education. So here they were learning about evolution in their science, and I'm learning right alongside with them things that I had never learned about evolution before.
Kari Hanks [02:23:16] Because two by twos believe in a young earth. Earth is like 6,000 years old. And evolution. Like, it's ridiculous that scientists think we come from monkeys. Obviously God made us Adam and Eve, all of that.
John Dehlin [02:23:29] So y' all are literal Adam and Eve as the first humans. 6,000 year old Earth?
Kari Hanks [02:23:34] Yeah. In fact, many two by twos don't believe in dinosaurs.
John Dehlin [02:23:37] Yeah, no dinosaurs.
Kari Hanks [02:23:38] Satan planted dinosaur bones to confuse.
John Dehlin [02:23:40] Wait, that's us. That's what I was taught. Wait a minute.
Kari Hanks [02:23:43] Not everyone's taught that I believed in dinosaurs. I just believed that they lived at the same time as humans because that's how you had to fit the timeline.
Kyle Hanks [02:23:50] What? I didn't believe that we'll get into my story, but I didn't.
Kari Hanks [02:23:55] It's funny because during this time, Kyle and I, as two by twos, you sort of learn, like, find a good two by two person to marry and then God will take care of the rest. And so there wasn't a lot of communication in our marriage at this time about nuances in our beliefs. We just sort of assumed we're both professing, so we must believe the same thing. And it turned out there were a lot of nuances. I was a very literal believer in everything in the Bible. And Kyle can talk about his beliefs later.
John Dehlin [02:24:25] Yeah. So we are taught as Mormons that any two faithful Mormons can make a marriage work as long as they're faithful Mormons. So it sounds like y' all had that really quickly. I think this is maybe a natural point to wrap up episode one and then we'll have maybe episode two, Start with Kyle's story and then weave back in the shelf breaking. But I heard you say early that politics kind of wasn't a part of that. They kind of two by twos kind of eschewed the world and eschewed political identity.
Kari Hanks [02:25:02] Yes.
John Dehlin [02:25:03] But I was wondering all along this is sounding if we're starting to do homeschooling and skepticism of medicine and you know, it's starting to sound like it could be politically tend to be politically conservative, which made me wonder how much there was a tie. There was a correlation between Republican support for the Republican party and being a two by two.
Kari Hanks [02:25:26] Yeah, the two by twos are very conservative. And I was racing political politically conservative. So my dad's Canadian, so he doesn't actually vote. And my mom just never did vote because a lot of two by twos believe that they shouldn't get involved in politics. But the two by twos that I do know who do vote would almost always vote Republican. And if you're liberal, you keep it to yourself because that's one of those like danger flags that could alarm the rest of the group if you start getting ideas that are not conservative.
John Dehlin [02:25:54] Okay.
Kyle Hanks [02:25:54] You're typically not involved politically though. You wouldn't. You don't see too many two by twos in politics or, you know, wearing the politics on their sleeve necessarily. I have met one that was a mayor one time, but that. That's it. That's the only political involvement I've seen from a two by two.
John Dehlin [02:26:09] Okay. And then just because I'm curious, like some of the book titles that you would have read that maybe you shouldn't have been reading around that Covid time. That would give us a flavor for the types of books that started opening your eyes. What would those.
Kari Hanks [02:26:25] A lot of Bart Ehrman.
John Dehlin [02:26:26] Oh, wait a minute.
Kari Hanks [02:26:27] That's not good for me.
John Dehlin [02:26:29] That's not good.
Kari Hanks [02:26:30] I was deep reconstructing the idea of hell through a lot of what he was talking about.
John Dehlin [02:26:35] First, where did you learn about Bart Ehrman?
Kari Hanks [02:26:38] Where did I learn about him? Probably Mormon stories. Oops, sorry, I don't remember for sure, but I think Mormon stories. I heard his name and then I started reading his books.
John Dehlin [02:26:49] Okay, wait. Maybe we can talk about how you really quickly how you got into Mormon stories and then we'll carry it over to the next episode.
Kari Hanks [02:26:56] You know, I don't exactly remember when I started listening, but as I was reading these books, I was also. I started reading a lot of books about people who had left other religions. Like, I was fascinated with cults. Clue number one. I was like, I'm not in a cult. But how. What would it be like to be in a cult. That's such a weird existence. So I was reading and looking for podcasts about other beliefs and other ideas and other viewpoints. And Mormon stories obviously came up as one of those. Other books I was reading were like White Fragility, Anti Racist, or I can't remember the exact title of the book,
Margi Dehlin [02:27:35] how to be an Anti Racist.
Kari Hanks [02:27:37] Yeah, I was reading. I started reading a lot of atheist books, Hitchens, Dawkins and I at the. Was around the end of November. So I should say, like, meetings in Arizona resumed in June of 2020, which there was a huge COVID wave. I think Arizona was leading the world for cases at that point. And then they decided to open meetings back up, which we just didn't feel safe going back at all.
Kari Hanks [02:28:10] And so we didn't. And so we had this physical space still through to the end of November 2020. It occurred to me, it was like a realization I had that I didn't believe in a higher power anymore. It didn't feel like a choice. It just felt like it hit me like a realization like I used to believe in a higher power. And through reading all these books and listening to different podcasts, not just yours, but other ones as well, I was realizing I didn't. I was unraveling all of it. I didn't believe in a higher power at all. And that kicked off a really difficult six months in our marriage.
John Dehlin [02:28:47] Yeah. And we'll get. We'll cover that next episode. And so how was there a lot of time between you not being sure you believed in God and starting to say, wait a minute, was I in a cult? Was there much time between those two?
Deconstruction and Leaving the Two by Twos
Kari Hanks [02:29:04] I don't remember when I started thinking the word culture, but it was, it happened all very quickly for me. My deconstruction, it was everything under the microscope, including, was I in a cult? It felt like all at the same time. So it was around that same, that same summer into fall that I started thinking there are really cult like aspects to this, especially the control over women was something that was really starting to bother me.
John Dehlin [02:29:35] Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:29:35] And just honestly, reading books about cults and people who had left cults and listening to Mormon stories and hearing so many different stories there and seeing similarities. Like there are difference. There are a lot of differences in different religions. But there's an underlying theme that for me, exclusivity was a big one. Like everyone who had left an exclusive religion, who was told, if you leave this religion, you're going to hell or, and. Or something awful will happen to you, like the two by twos, would often preach, if you leave. If you leave meetings, you'll die in a car accident. Or here's someone who left meetings and they got cancer and died. Like, those stories were common themes. I was hearing from other cults as well, and I was like, well, if that's a cult and the same thing's happening here, maybe this is a cult.
John Dehlin [02:30:25] Well, that's a really good cliffhanger for part two, so. And still, Kyle, I really, really want to hear anything you want to share about your intro story up to this point that helps us get a sense for the cracks that developed for you.
Kari Hanks [02:30:40] Sure.
John Dehlin [02:30:40] Sounds good, but what a great introduction to the two by twos. What a great sense for the lived experience now of people who are two by twos. And so many parallels between two by twos and Mormonism. And, you know, some of the content is, you know, different, but you know, that we're tracking with how familiar your. Your story. I mean, it's different, but in so. In so many ways, it's.
Kari Hanks [02:31:10] It's a lot of similarities.
John Dehlin [02:31:12] Yeah. So I guess I just want to say, Kari, thank you so much.
Margi Dehlin [02:31:17] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:31:18] For being willing to share your story up to this point. And also, Kylann, Kari, thanks to you both for helping us learn about another tradition which is always effective in helping us see our tradition more clearly through someone else's tradition.
Kari Hanks [02:31:34] Kyle and I have always said, like, we feel like Mormons are our cousins.
John Dehlin [02:31:38] Yeah.
Kyle Hanks [02:31:39] Like third cousins. Like, not a cousin, you know very well, just a cousin that's around. Like, they show up at a reunion, you're not sure where they came from.
Kari Hanks [02:31:44] You're like, hey, we kind of look alike.
Kyle Hanks [02:31:46] We know some of the same people.
Margi Dehlin [02:31:48] And there's something. It feels meaningful, especially with the secretive aspect, I think, of what you all have been through, to actually say it out loud. Like, we were talking about words, the power of words, speaking something into existence. Where there is that kind of secretive aspect, there is, like, the lack of records kind of out there. It just feels meaningful. Like, this is. This is a record of sorts of what is in a way that a lot of people would not be able to fully understand without hearing it from you. Yeah.
Kari Hanks [02:32:26] Thank you for recognizing that, because that's very true.
Margi Dehlin [02:32:29] Yeah.
John Dehlin [02:32:30] And as we're closing, we just want to remind people that it's really helpful if you'll like this episode on YouTube or Facebook, if you'll comment on it, if you'll subscribe to our podcast, that all really. And if you'll share it with others. All of that really helps these get shared far and wide by the algorithms. We also just want to always mention that we all exist primarily through the generous donations of our donors.
John Dehlin [02:33:00] Two thirds of our revenue comes just from donors who subscribe to the podcast and then every month they donate to keep us afloat. So if you are a donor, thank you. You're the reason why we're here. If you're not a donor and you want to see this type of content continue, you can just go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button, and become a monthly donor. And we'll keep helping. Not just Mormons and progressive Mormons and ex Mormons, but over half of our audience has never been Mormon, like these wonderful people. So you can know that your donations don't just support our people, but they support a lot of people all over the world, which is really fun to know.
John Dehlin [02:33:43] So, yeah. So next episode is all going to be we're going to shift from the hook of we discovered we were in a cult to, oh, oh my gosh, how do we leave a cult? And then in your case, how do we help?
Building Community and Finding Support
John Dehlin [02:34:00] How do we help create a community to support other people? And how does Mormonism and Mormon stories kind of interweave with that and play a role? Anything you want to say, Margi?
Margi Dehlin [02:34:11] I don't think so.
John Dehlin [02:34:12] Okay.
Margi Dehlin [02:34:12] I'm excited to dig in and hear a little more from Kyle this next time around, too.
John Dehlin [02:34:17] Well, thanks, Kyle and Kari Hanks. Thanks everyone for joining us and come right back for part two. Be good to each other, be kind to each other, and we'll see you all again for part two of this episode of Help Help Us get out of the Two by Twos. Or we figured out we had to get out of the two by twos with Kyle and Kari Hanks. Take care, everybody.
Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.
One Response
Just watched part one if the interview with The Hanks leaving Two by Two. I cannot express how interesting it is to find others who grew up in this kind of group. I grew up in The Salvation Army. They do good things but life on the inside is very similar to what I heard today! Our pastors ( called Officers) are in pairs. We call it ” The Work” and ” Leaving the Work”. Thank you for being brave enough to share.